


Put On Your Face

by Hannah



Series: Dog Days Are Over [1]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-15
Updated: 2012-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 13:49:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 50,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My own take on what might be under Pyro's mask.</p><p>
  <i>I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. - R.M. Rilke</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Put On Your Face

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks go to Amp and Kara for cheer-leading, and Toxo for beta-reading.

1.

They never caught me when I set the hills on fire. Nobody did. I got caught when I got stupid and angry – burning buildings doesn’t work like it does in the movies. I’d just wanted to see it all go up, and I’d known enough to lay out more than enough fucking gasoline to make sure it’d all burn, but I’d thought it’d all go up fast, not in parts. And I’d been too angry to check and see if there were still propane tanks and an active gas main in the basement.

The fire department didn’t catch me when they arrived because they had no fucking idea who I was; as far as they knew, I was just someone who had to get to a hospital fast.

Or maybe they did catch me. I don’t know, and I didn’t ask to find out.

When I got out of the morphine coma, it was four weeks later, and she came to talk to me three days after that when I was finally able to hold up my end of a conversation without losing it after a couple of minutes. She was my first visitor and didn’t sit down, just came up right to my bed, introduced herself as Miss Pauling, and said she had something to offer me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and told her to fuck off.

She came back to my room the next day, but she was the one who apologized for coming too soon. I just repeated myself to make her leave.

The third time was a Tuesday, and that time I listened because she brought me lunch. By then I was onto real food and not nutrition right to my veins or a nasto-gastric tube, but all I’d gotten was mass-produced cafeteria crap. She came in, said hello, and gave me a real meal before she said anything else. I couldn’t even get real TV in my room, and she came in with a goddamn honest four-course meal, real fish and hot soup and the right amount of sauce on everything. I’d ripped open one of the containers and swallowed half of it by the time she pulled over a chair and sat down.

She waited until I was done with everything and sucking the last bits of sauce off the chopsticks before she said anything. This time was different. “I’ve always found it’s easier to talk when I’m not hungry. Hypermetabolism can’t make that easy.”

I wasn’t really paying attention. “Oh, fuck no. You just gotta keep eating even if you’re not hungry, but it’s still better than paste through a tube.”

“Available in every color of the rainbow. But if you’d rather eat real food every meal, we can arrange for that.” I looked at her and she just smiled. “The people I represent can arrange for a great deal of things. Take your accommodations, for example. You’re in the best burn ward in the city, and all the bills – every single one – have been taken care of by the people I represent.” She crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair, smoothed out her purple dress. “And if you’d like something more than what you had waiting for you after you get out of the hospital, we can take care of that too.”

“No shit.”

“None whatsoever.” She kept going with that little smile. “And I assure you that the people I represent are doing what it can to help you listen to what we have to offer to you. That’s all. If you don’t want to accept, that’s up to you, but we’d appreciate it if you’d hear us out first.” No way was she telling the truth. No way, except it felt like she was, and my lunch was real, and she hadn’t sounded like she’d been bullshitting me. I stared at her, at that little smile that said she knew more than I did.

“So how much is this whole thing costing you guys?”

“Please, don’t worry about that.” She pulled her bag over and took out a business card, and set it down on the bedside table before standing up to go. “Just meet with us and hear us out, and we’ll consider it a fine investment.” I watched her shut the door behind her, heard her shoes click down the hall, and then I picked up the card.

Six weeks later, the day I got discharged, the first thing I did after making sure my landlord hadn’t rented my apartment to someone else, was go to the address on the card. I took the bus over to a nondescript building near the middle of downtown. Someone took me upstairs, past some offices to a meeting room, and after a couple of minutes Miss Pauling arrived. She wasn’t smiling this time.

It pissed me off, like she wasn’t even going to let me say anything, but what she said – she was right. Nobody goes to a meeting like that just to see what’s on the table. People go to meetings like that because they want to say yes, no matter what’s being offered, even before they know what it is. I don’t think there’s ever been fucking anyone who’s ever gone to a meeting with someone like Miss Pauling and said no. She knew I’d say yes before I even sat down. Just showing up was enough.

All she had to say was they knew it was me at Brentwood. I mean, holy fuck. “How – the police don’t know, how the fuck did you –”

“The people I represent are very thorough.” She folded her hands over each other on the table and leaned forward. “We’ve been watching your activities for quite some time, and you’ve got an impressive record.” She smiled. “How would you like it to disappear?”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“Everything. Gone. All your records expunged from the system like you weren’t even there. We can make that happen.” I couldn’t even breathe. “Would you like it to?”

“Fuck yes.”

Then she told me what I was getting into, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You won’t be sent out right away.” She’d started clicking a pen she’d pulled out of her bag with some papers. “You’ll need some time for training; we don’t want to drop you in green. Not that you don’t have applicable experience…” She passed the whole pile over to me and showed me where to sign, and I didn’t bother to read most of it but one part halfway through caught me and had me go back to check to make sure what I’d read. I’d seen privacy clauses all over the place, I knew what they looked like, and that one was different. There was a lot more to it than any other one I’d ever had to sign – there were a lot of things I couldn’t talk about to anyone not on the team or from the company, other things that people could keep confidential if they wanted, and I wouldn’t get to use my name with the team. When I’d be working, I’d get called by my class designation, and that’d be my name as far as everyone was concerned.

As far as I was concerned, I could leave that one behind without giving a fuck, so I did.

When everything was done and signed and dated, Miss Pauling shook my hand, and didn’t even flinch when she touched the burns. “Welcome to RED, Pyro.”

2.

I made them show me what they’d gotten rid of, all of it, after they got their hands on it and scrubbed me out of there. The hospital stays, the intake forms, everything. They’d gotten it all. I wasn’t in them anymore, no matter how hard I looked.

“You weren’t kidding.” I looked up at Miss Pauling, standing there all cool. “You really weren’t kidding.”

She smiled like she was actually happy. “We take care of our investments, Pyro.”

After she left, I pulled my mask back on and went back to welding. I’d had to start over twice to get the shape right for everything I needed it to be – I’d built flamethrowers before, a couple of times, and it wasn’t like I didn’t know what I was doing and what I shouldn’t do to make it blow up in my face, but I’d never made one this important.

They’d already gotten me what I needed, quality stuff that I hadn’t scavenged from old gas stations and junkyards or what was left over in the back of the shop – I knew my way around fire, I’d better know my goddamn way around fire, but shotguns and axes weren’t things I’d ever played with. I’d never done anything in a fucking full-body chemsuit complete with gas mask, either, and I had to learn how to do everything in one of those.

Building it took the next week, on and off. I took all the fucking time I could between swinging the axe around and handling the shotgun’s kick and starting over and going back to where I’d been when I realized I’d done something wrong with the pilot light and getting used to lugging around an oxygen tank hooked up to my mask. RED didn’t want me fighting for them green, and that meant learning what the fuck I was supposed to be doing. And that meant maybe six hours of sleep a night if I was lucky, because I had to get up at bumfuck o’clock to do it all over again. There were some nights I didn’t bother getting out of the suit; I’d just take off the mask and fall onto my bed and pass out.

When I finally finished building it, I pulled off my gloves and slid both my hands over it. I hadn’t touched it without gloves before – things feel different through gloves, and I wanted to see just how different, and god, I wasn’t ready for it. It was knowing that it was done, that I’d gone so far to make it, that made it feel so good. Different parts caught my palms in different ways, and I curled my fingers over the pole and the tank, brought it up to my face to rub my cheeks against the smooth metal. The whole thing felt so fucking good. I closed my eyes and held it in my arms, hugged it close and smiled so hard my cheeks hurt. It’d been dark for hours and I was so tired I knew I wouldn’t even get my fucking boots off but I had to, I knew it’d work but I had to test it, and ran outside and flicked the switch and lit up the night like a goddamn beautiful shooting star.

I got another two days of practice in before another meeting in another office in another boring building and eight folders got handed over and laid out on the table. Turned out RED had been waiting on one last hire, and with him and me the company had the team it wanted. I started to flip through the folders – nobody had a name either, and I’d be meeting them tomorrow.

Miss Cooper pulled another folder out of her bag, flipped it open and pushed it over to me. “BLU’s been making some moves, experiments – we need to keep pace, find out what they’ve got hidden. We need you to capture it for us, bring it back.”

“Tomorrow? I thought they’d said –”

The way she sighed quietly without a lot of noise got my attention better than if she’d screamed. “Do you have anything else you need to be doing?”

I shook my head. “No, ma’am.”

“Good. Now, you’ll be shipped out first thing. Pack up your gear tonight.” She started tapping points on the map like that’d make it easier for me to find them. Her nails clicked like a goddamn typewriter when she pointed out where my team would be stationed, where BLU had its info stashed away. “It’s accessible by train, I assume you don’t yet have your own transport secured, you’ll have to take care of that in the future.” She went on for a while about where the fort was and what I’d expect in there, and then she let me read the fucking folders. Peace and quiet finally, Jesus Christ.

I flipped up the first page for the Sniper and then looked up. “I don’t get to take these with me, right?”

She pulled her lips tight. “That’s correct.”

“Gotcha.” I went back to reading as much as I could before I got driven back to where they were keeping me stashed. It wasn’t bad out there, just really close to nowhere. I liked it out there in their little training camp: they’d gotten me the stuff for my flamethrower without asking, and the food was always way better than hospital and institution crap. The only thing I didn’t like about the place was that I wasn’t used to sleeping where it got so quiet and dark at night, but that only happened on nights I wasn’t too tired to care.

Dad always wanted to live up in the mountains. I’d only gotten two weeks, but it was still way more than he ever had.

3.

It was easy to see RED and BLU were in it for the long haul. I didn’t think science research stations would have barracks and infirmaries and kitchens, fucking full-service kitchens with dishwashers and real gas stoves, not unless they were in the fucking Yukon or something. Which RED turned out to have and I might end up getting sent up there one of these days, so I guess that’s the answer to that question. All the bases come with enough stuff to make sure the staff can live there and do their job without having to leave until they’re done, and that’s mostly the scientists, but it’s also the people who need to keep everything in the base safe from whoever’s trying to get at it.

As soon as I could, I’d call dibs on a room with a lock on the door. BLU had started early and RED hadn’t gotten enough notice to ship me out to arrive with everyone else, so I’d be the last to arrive this time. My stomach flopped all over the place, going up and down, and I tried to breathe through it. Everyone else was at the base already, and I could see something going on when the train curved around the base, something bright and loud and pretty. Hot damn, it looked amazing. I didn’t have any reason to be scared. I knew what I was doing, I didn’t need to be scared. Not of the battle, not of anyone. My flamethrower was riding in the train with me, I made sure it got its own seat, and the sun was hitting it just right for the barrel to shine. I reached out and held it tight, and that was enough to make me feel good again.

There was a drop-off point away from the main base so the train didn’t stop right in the middle of the battlefield, I guess that made sense but I just wanted to be there and not spend any fucking time getting there. I could hear it all the way over here, for Christ’s sake, I should be there. I grabbed everything and threw my bags into a locker, pulled my flamethrower up onto my back and grabbed my axe and gun, and started running where I need to go. The fort wasn’t huge, and my team had the western half of it and some of the intel locked down, and it’d taken most of the goddamn day to get there by train and I was just getting in and there wouldn’t be time to talk strategy until nighttime. Everyone else was here already and I really needed a room with a goddamn lock on the door, I didn’t know if any were left. I read the files and studied the maps and the rooms were down that last hallway, and the best thing I could do before I ran into anyone was look the fuck where I was going. I didn’t run into him like some damn cartoon, but what the fuck, how could anyone be shorter than me?

He had a hardhat and goggles on and was lugging around a huge toolbox of scraps and I stopped and took a step back and he just smiled, shifted the toolbox over and stuck out his right hand. “You must be our Pyro. I’m Engineer, pleased t’meet you.”

“Uh, hello there.” It came out muffled through the mask and if that bothered him I couldn’t see it through his goggles. “Nice to meet you too.” Shaking his hand felt weird since we were both wearing gloves, and I pulled away before he did.

Maybe he couldn’t understand me but I could hear him fine. He tapped his hand on the box, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I gotta get this teleporter down to the sewers and don’t have the time to say more than salutations. But I hope I’m correct that I’ll see you in the mess tonight?” I nodded hard and he smiled. “This evening, then.” He ran off towards the battle, the shouting and explosions and gunfire, and I wanted to run after him and jump the fuck in and start right away but first thing, even before I’d get my room, I had to hit up the respawn system. RED got me on record back when I signed their papers, but it wouldn’t kick in unless it knew I was there. The thing’s way deep in the base, all the way in the fucking back of it, and it looked like a locker room – like the most goddamn ordinary locker room anyone could think of.

It took me a moment to find the jackport, and I double-double checked to make sure I was alone and even laid out a little spray of fire around me just to be sure. I pulled off my left glove and pressed my pointer finger to the port, and jerked away when it felt like something bit me – motherfucker! – it was just a needle to get my blood to make sure it was me. Something made a whirring noise and then a pop and ding, and I was good to go.

Miss Pauling gave me a copy of the base’s map before I left and I’d tried to memorize it on the ride over, but it didn’t matter that I knew where everything was because I didn’t know where anyone was, RED or BLU. I held my flamethrower tighter, my finger aching from the jab. I thought that maybe I should look for Engineer, find someone who knows what’s going on already and have him fill me in, and I started to walk down the hallways, trying to remember the fastest way out.

Then I turned a corner and there was the BLU Soldier down the hall. Oh fuck me with a drainpipe, just, he was right there, maybe thirty feet away. He hadn’t heard me coming, I knew if he had he’d be charging at me and not stalking around like an idiot, but even if he had, if he knew I was there and turned around he couldn’t see my face. I licked my lips, swallowed, and crept up behind him and he still looked all the way around except behind him. I took as deep a breath as I could through the mask and put my finger on the trigger.

“Hello there!” I shouted as I started running. That got his attention, and whipped around and pulled his shovel and started to scream right when the flames hit him. “I’m Pyro, glad to meet you!”

“Fire! Fire!” He spun around, and this son of a bitch was grade-a crazy, still trying to run at me as he was screaming he was on fire. “Fire is for COOKING! You should have a REAL GUN, hippie, not a portable campfire! All that’s suitable for your kind is –”

Then I hit him with my axe. I pulled it out of his arm and he swung it around, blood flying. “You maggot! This is an insult to the noble and just art of the battlefield!” He was on fire and bleeding and the bastard was still on his feet, pulled out his shovel and swung it around and fuck! I stumbled back and rubbed my head where he’d hit me, and goddamn if that was his smile I didn’t want to see what was under that motherfucking helmet.

So I hit him again. And again, and he swung his shovel and I jumped back and hit him again, and I kept hitting and hitting until he was down at my feet. I gripped my axe tighter and swung it again, and he twitched but I think that was because I hit the right place in his spine. I hit him again just to make sure.

I wiped my lenses, which didn’t do anything except smear the crap on them. Stupid gloves. So I fired a couple of air blasts to put out the fire and grabbed the edge of the Soldier’s shirt and used that to get the blood off, tried to breathe normally. I’d killed people before, but I’d only read about it in the paper after the firemen put everything out and they could go in and count the bodies. Eight or ten or twenty is a lot, and I always felt something when I read what happened because of me, and I learned then no matter how many people I’d killed with my fires it didn’t feel the same as a single one at my feet.

I shouldn’t have thought it would.

Then I heard something explode and I started running towards it. I could hear gunfire, but not like my shotgun. This was huge gunfire, gigantic, fucking enormous sounds and then I turned the corner and there was the courtyard, all the sounds and gunfire and fighting right there, my team, their team, almost everyone, and I grabbed my flamethrower and hoisted it over my head and shook it and let out a huge laugh. And then I charged.

“Ready or not, here I come!”

Not that anyone heard what I’d said through my mask. Not that it mattered. They heard me coming and they were ready to fucking listen. They didn’t know who I was but I did, and I was more than ready to teach them.

When I think about my first day on the battlefield, I’m still surprised I didn’t get milled through respawn a half-dozen times my first hour the way I was racing around shouting my head off and blasting at everything. I’d gone crazy from that Soldier kill and just from being there – that frenzy people talk about, that’s all real. I felt like the biggest badass motherfucker around and fought like a goddamn six-year-old girl. Ran like one, too, when the Soldier jumped out of hiding trying to blast me with his rockets and hit me with the shrapnel, ran until I saw Medic who happened to be right around the corner from Heavy, and when I got the medigun the Soldier got the minigun. I watched him get shattered by bullets and laughed right along with Heavy. It was just too goddamn funny to watch, and the medigun felt so fucking good.

“Little teammate must be more careful,” Heavy said when the Soldier finished falling apart. “Is only luck Doktor and I were here.”

I gave him a thumbs-up and he smiled. Then someone else shouted for Medic, I think it was Scout, so the two of them were off and running. “Thanks, doc!” I yelled after them, then turned to haul ass to give our Demoman some cover.

I didn’t know when the day’s fighting started and I didn’t know when it ended, except that it was almost nighttime and we’d sent all the BLUs running back to the half of the base they’d claimed for themselves, the half with the intel we needed to grab. I hadn’t gone through respawn at all, even once, and felt fucking invincible. I lit up my flamethrower in one last blaze for the night, arced it over our heads and cheered and watched it go out against the sunset.

Then someone slapped my shoulder and I jumped. “Easy there.” I looked and saw it was Engineer, grinning and happy, and I relaxed. “Y’did really good out there your first day.”

“Thank you.”

He sort of half-laughed, half-sighed and slapped me again. “Now what about that dinner we’d discussed?”

I wanted to, I swear I did, but I didn’t even have a room yet and shit, my bags were still at the train stop. Jesus, the things you forget when you’re chopping people to bits. “In a minute, I gotta get my stuff.” I pointed towards the station, waved my hands around, and he slapped his forehead.

“My goodness, that’s right. You only just got here, we should see you settled in first.” I nodded hard, and after we got my bags he took me over to the dorms, pointed out the closet where the towels and sheets were, which rooms belonged to who and which ones I could grab. All I wanted was a bed and a door with a lock; the first free room he showed me had both, and that was all I needed to throw my bags in the closet and set my flamethrower down on the bed. I flicked off the pilot light, turned to go and saw Engineer staring at it lying there.

“Say, can I take a look at that? If y’don’t mind, that is,” he added right away. Goddamn right I minded, it was my goddamn flamethrower. I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head, what the hell did he want to see it for. He shrugged and spread his hands. “It’s just a real beauty of a thing.” Fuck yeah, it was a beauty. And the way he was looking at it – I’d watched him put up a sentry earlier and I’d seen how careful he’d been with it, all the wires and gears and bits I didn’t know names for. He’d talked to it, too. The guy knew machines and how they worked, and he wasn’t going over to pick it up even though he wanted to. I could see he did, and he wasn’t.

So I picked it up and held it out to him. He took it gently, ran his hands over the barrel and gas canister, and turned it over to look at the underside and the handle and the welding I’d done. He smiled when he asked, “You made this?” I nodded. He kept smiling. “Real solid craftsmanship. You got a good eye for it.” He held it out to me and I set it back down on the bed. “Say, if you ever need to touch it up – routine maintenance, like – my workshop’s always open. Just knock anytime.”

“Thanks.” I gave him a thumbs-up to make sure he understood. “That’s really nice of you to offer.”

Everyone else was already eating dinner. I’d met most of them running around trying not to get killed, and the ones I hadn’t Engineer took care of. He slapped me on the back, told everyone to give me a warm welcome to the base, and then got himself a plate of whatever was on the stove and sat down next to Scout. There was still plenty of space at the table for me to sit – I didn’t even have to sit right next to anyone if I wanted – but there was no goddamn way I was eating in front of everyone. I got my dinner and started to leave.

“You won’t be joining us?” Spy asked quietly.

I shook my head, waved to everyone, and went back to my room and locked the door as soon as I got in there. I put the food on the desk, pulled my mask off and set it next to my flamethrower, unlocked my oxygen canister and stashed it in the closet, took off my gloves and hung them on my chair, and then I pulled out the chair and sat down to eat.

It was a meat stew with some canned beans thrown in. After the day I’d had I’d have eaten just about anything; I didn’t know what the meat was was so I guess that counted. I knew it smelled great, and it tasted fine, better than fine, it tasted fantastic. It wasn’t just how hungry I was and how fast I was shoveling it in. I wanted to go back for seconds, but I knew I couldn’t keep going in and out of my room. It’d only been a few minutes, so I couldn’t go back out anyway. I tried to get used to the idea of sleeping there for however long this mission would take. It seemed like a pretty good idea right then – the battle high and endorphin rush had come crashing down and I didn’t have the energy to do anything but sit in my chair and look around the room.

It had a bed, a closet, a dresser chest, a desk, and a chair. There was a lamp on the desk, a light on the ceiling, and a small window next to the bed. The desk had some drawers, too, and I didn’t find anything in them, not even a paper clip. When whoever’d been sleeping here last had cleared out, they’d gone fast and taken everything.

I figured I’d had enough time for dinner, so pulled myself out of the chair, got my mask and gloves on and my bandolier too, clipped on the thermoses and headed back to the kitchen. Everyone was gone, and I went to the sink to wash my dishes and get some water. I’d filled up the second thermos and uncapped the third, and before I got a chance someone yelled from right behind me. I jumped and spun around to see Soldier smirking at me.

“Jesus Christ!”

He kept smirking, then snapped back into his regular howling commando face. “Private! After witnessing your performance this afternoon, I’ll have you know that you were not a complete and utter disgrace to your team, and that you managed that on your first day is no small accomplishment! However, there were no less than six different instances in which you were unable to hit a stationary man-sized target at less than thirty meters. Continued failure in that department would be grounds for dismissal in any military force, but our superiors seem to have relaxed their standards.” He leaned in closer and flecks of spittle started to hit my mask, making me blink. “Battle strategies and plans are discussed at oh-seven-thirty in the common room. I will see you at the locker room suited up and ready for target practice at oh-six-hundred. Failure to improve will see you as the target for future practice sessions!”

I wiped off my lenses.

“Have I made myself clear?”

“Can I go to bed now?”

“Very well then! Oh-five-hundred it is!” He turned around and, no exaggeration, marched out of the kitchen, kicking his knees up and everything.

“Fuck me so hard.” Sure, my door locked, so he couldn’t force his way in tomorrow morning, and the bastard had a point: I did need more practice with my shotgun, and he was better with his than Scout and Heavy. But fuck me, that was at least an hour of sleep I’d miss. It wasn’t all that late, but I felt like I could sleep for a week right then. A weekend, at least.

Showering could wait another day. I grabbed the stuff I needed to make my bed from the closet, then went back for a couple extra towels. I folded one up on the floor like a pillow and wrapped the other around the head of my flamethrower, then leaned it against the wall safe and secure.

Everything came off again and I kept going to my boots and socks, then unzipped and stepped out of my suit, and I hissed at the cold floor under my feet. The sheets went on the bed next. I cleared out my bags, stuffed my clothes in the dresser and hung up my two extra suits in the closet. At least there were coat hangers, but I had to triple-up for them to support the suits. The window opened when I pushed it, and night breezes started to flow inside. After the day of running around in my suit, they felt goddamn fantastic. I sat back on my knees and ran my hands up and down my arms, shivering because it felt so cold and because I felt like I’d get caught even with the door locked. My scars caught on each other like they always did and something ran down my spine, a good something. I’ve never been able to tell anyone that it’s a good something and have them believe me.

Finally, I peeled off my clothes and underpants – the first time I’d put on my suit, I’d lasted ten seconds before taking it off and hunting down some shirts that’d fit under there because otherwise it’d chafe and rub like a bitch. Sweating would do that. I sniffed my armpits and figured nobody would smell me through my suit anyway. I got into my pajamas, turned off the light, and got into bed.

I knew my body was ready to stop moving but I could feel my brain spinning around, everything running through my head too fast for me to settle down, and I needed some goddamn sleep. So I pulled myself out of bed, dragged myself over to the closet, dug around in my bags, and pulled out my Zippo. I flicked it on and watched the tiny flame go, curving and dancing, tried to follow the soft edges of it and lose myself in the green and blue and white. It worked the way it always did, and I could feel myself calm down and everything go quiet, and then I knew I was ready to sleep.

And that was my first day on the job.

4.

We weren’t on a smash-and-grab mission for the intel RED needed. Spy explained my second day there, right after breakfast and long after target practice, that it wasn’t set out in a briefcase for us. BLU wasn’t that stupid. Everyone on the team knew what we were looking for, since it’d been in all our mission briefings, and getting it from their base to ours would be easy enough once one of us got our hands on it. It was the getting it that was the bitch of the problem – we had to get over there, sort through whatever BLU had on its base, bring it back, relay what we’d grabbed to our employers, and make sure it wasn’t a coded dummy file with a secret family recipe for potato salad instead of what RED actually wanted. Something about painkillers. It was probably on a reel-to-reel tape, but it could be on fucking anything, papers, vinyl records, punch cards, cocktail napkins. Spy chuckled at that last one, and I didn’t get the chance to ask him about it since Demo and Engineer came in, then Heavy, and soon we were all around the table figuring out how we’d be hauling ass that day.

By the end of my fourth day, everyone had figured out they shouldn’t ask me if I wanted to eat with them at mealtimes. Scout took the longest, fuck me if I knew why, everyone else got it by the second night. Even Engineer didn’t keep bugging me about it. I ate in my room and so what if I did, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I wasn’t doing anything to break up the team dynamic on the battlefield, so there wasn’t a good reason for anyone to give a crap about it. I ate in my room and locked the door when I took a shower, and thank fuck the shower room door locked. I still don’t know why RED included that, maybe they thought it’d be good place to fortify in case zombies attacked, and I wasn’t going to ask anyone since I didn’t give a crap about why. I was just glad the lock was there.

I wasn’t a shut-in. I’d talk the day’s battle strategy in the morning with everyone and if there was any downtime at the end of the day I’d spend it in a common area. They had real TV here, black-and-white but great reception, and sometimes Spy or Engineer wanted to watch the news but usually left it to me or Scout. Target practice with Soldier lasted a week, and at the end he slapped me on the shoulder and promised me a medal as soon as Engineer let him back near his workshop to make one.

“You really don’t need to do that.” I was a fuckton better than I’d been a few days ago and some of that was from trying to get good enough for Soldier to stop hammering on my door every morning but most of it was from covering everyone on the battlefield and figuring out how to do that the best I could. I wasn’t charging straight ahead anymore – that only worked when nobody knew who the hell I was or what I might do next. When he was cleaning Sasha and I was filling up the propane tank, Heavy explained the two most dangerous people to fight were the experts, since they knew everything everyone might do, and the beginners, since nobody knew what they were going to do.

“You get a little good, you stop being crazy beginner, and then stay alive until you are expert.” He dipped the rag back in the grease, rotated the barrel, and moved onto the next segment. “Is skill. Staying alive in battle, is all skill. You learn. Here, is easier.” He chuckled and made a sound that I’d hear out of a pissed-off giant tiger or bear, not a person. “Much easier. You learn same lesson over and over until ready to remember.”

Nobody liked respawn. Everyone used it and nobody liked it. I got milled through it the first time around noon my second day – I wasn’t looking and just charged through a doorway and one of the BLU Demoman’s grenades hit me as soon as I cleared the building. If I’d seen it coming I’d have air-blasted it back at him, but I hadn’t, so I didn’t, so I woke up in respawn maybe twenty minutes later feeling like I’d crapped my pants.

It happened again a couple hours later when their Spy just waltzed up like it was the fucking prom dressed up like Soldier. He didn’t stab me in the back right away; he tricked me into covering for him and helped him get back to his base without Sniper taking any potshots at him. Then he stabbed me in the back. Asshole.

After I filled the tank and cleaned the barrels, I tracked down Scout and dragged him outside to help me work on my air-blasts. It took me a few tries to get him to understand what I wanted to do, and then I had to make sure he got that I didn’t want to set his baseballs on fire. “I only got so many of these,” he snarled.

“No, you throw them at me and I shoot them back.” I pointed me and then to the far end of the courtyard, then to him next to me, drew a curve in the air and made a ‘whoooo’ noise. He crossed his arms and held his ball tight and glared. “It’ll be like catch. Come on, everybody knows catch.” I cupped an imaginary ball, tossed it, caught it with my other hand, and then he finally figured out what the fuck I’d been trying to tell him.

“Hey, if all you wanna to do is shoot ’em back to me, you just needed to say so.”

“Blow me, you asshole.”

He jogged over to the other side of the courtyard, yelled, “Batter up!” and threw the ball at me. My blast went wide and he had to dash over and jump up to catch it. “Hey, I’m all the way over there! Try aiming next time!”

“What the hell you think I’m trying to do?” He pitched again and I didn’t send it back as wide, just high, way high. He had to jump and climb on top of a crate to get it.

“Man, you really do need the practice. Think fast!” He threw it at me from up there and I tried aiming where he’d be if he was on the ground, and it went wide again. “Aw, jeez, are you even trying? You’re freakin’ embarrassing me.” I flipped him off, which for some reason sent him into a huge giggle fit, but what-the-fuck ever. He wasn’t getting tired of it and I needed to keep going. I think he’d have been willing to go as long as I didn’t stop him from running his mouth off.

“Yeah, it’s better than the army here, they actually got me goin’ out and fighting, I got like eight months of training and the whole thing was bullcrap, they sent me to friggin’ Kentucky, I mean what the hell’s in Kentucky, nothin’. And I could totally beat up anyone my first day there, coulda skipped over all that and gone right to the guns but they had to shoot us with tear gas first, whoa!” He ran over to get the ball and kept on going. “Food’s better here too, I mean Sniper’s always getting something fresh plus whatever they got in the kitchen and Hardhat’s, I got it! Yeah, whatever’s in the kitchen, it’s all ours when we get here, I got dibs on canned oranges and milk so don’t even think about those, you gotta ask me if you want milk and remember ’cause I know where you sleep, aw come on!” He jumped back on top of the crate again. “It’s freakin’ unbelievable how much you suck!”

I shot a little flame burst. “Whoa, whoa, all right, you don’t suck, I’m just keepin’ track of how bad you’re doin’, you want me to stop you get better.” He tossed the ball up in the air a couple of times before jumping down to pitch it back. “They never shut up about that, yeah that’s better here too, every damn thing’s something they’re yelling about, do this do that do this do that do it again, it was fine the first time you jackass, maybe we’d do better if you weren’t yelling all the time. We know, dumbass, you think we weren’t payin’ attention? Try shuttin’ up and seein’ what that does. It’s just Soldier here and he ain’t that bad, not like there’s ten of him running around.”

He kept talking the whole time we were out there, jumping from one thing to another something like every time he threw the ball – the Red Sox, pizza, what’d he’d have done if he’d stayed in the army, how much everyone else showered, how it was bullshit the way they’d talk in something besides English just to keep whatever they were saying private.

I shot the ball all the way over to the edge of the courtyard and smiled when Scout had to run after it; I’d done it on purpose that time. “I got it, I got it!”

We hadn’t started that late and it hadn’t gotten real dark yet. It wasn’t too dark to see the ball through my mask since the damn thing was so white it pretty much glowed in the dark but I knew it would be soon and I didn’t want to call it off yet, I wanted Scout to do that. I hated how it sounded even in my own head, but I was having too much fun to want to call it in and head inside. Not because we weren’t being shot at with bombs or rockets or dodging shotguns and rifles and not because I was getting good enough I had a pretty decent chance of sending the ball wherever I wanted it to go. Just because, oh fuck me I felt like a girl just thinking it, just because it was fun to be out there playing catch with Scout. I couldn’t feel the breezes through my suit and mask and I couldn’t smell them either but I knew they were there, and that time of day was always my favorite, especially in summer when the foothills and mountains were all dried out and fires burned clean.

I wasn’t a total outcast from everyone, not at first, not when I was a little kid, but my scars caught on fast and I’d gotten used to a lot of it. But people were always asking me all sorts of shit about my scars, do those go all the way down, like that’s new, or they’d go ahead and stare at them. Listen, jackass, if you’re staring at them you’re staring at me, you want to look at them it’s okay to ask me, shit, I’d ask me too, just don’t stare.

And Scout wasn’t staring. Scout was just tossing the ball up in the air. And it wasn’t just him not staring – this boring, ordinary, everyday shit, playing catch. I didn’t have people to play catch with when I was a kid. Not just catch, all the fucking things kids are supposed to do with each other when they go out and play. I tried a few times but nobody would go for it, not with me even before my scars, and I’d try with my parents but they wouldn’t either, and here I was doing it, and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the mask and suit and RED.

“You ready to call it? It’s getting pretty dark.”

“Sure.” Thank fuck, I was ready. We started walking inside and he kept on talking.

“Hey, maybe next time I should bring my bat, you know, I throw the ball and you shoot it and I hit it and you shoot it back, wham whack whoooo waaahaaa, just go back and forth, how’s that sound.”

“You really think that’s a good idea?”

“It’s not like anyone else around here cares about baseball, even Hardhat, he watches football, come on what’s there to see in football, they’re just dancing around the field anyway you might as well go to the freakin’ ballet, what else is there, cricket or rugby or soccer, and don’t start because Demo always says soccer should be football but football’s football and soccer’s soccer.” He punched me on the arm, a lot lighter than Engineer’s slaps. “But you’re pretty okay.”

I grinned. “Thanks, Scout.”

“Yeah, and,” he let out a huge yawn. “Whoa, sorry, see you tomorrow okay?”

“Sure.”

I was falling-over tired too, way beyond ready to fall into bed. But if I went to bed right then I wouldn’t get a chance for a shower until the next day at least and my skin was way too grimy to make that an option, so I had to hold off for another half-hour. Some days I’d break it up and get up to shower at three in the morning and then go back to sleep for a couple more hours, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get up if I sat down, so I’d just keep on going a little more. I didn’t keep much stuff in the shower room – a couple of towels, my toothbrush and some toothpaste and a cup, the same crap as the rest of the guys that we didn’t want to keep taking back and forth. The mirrors were still fogged up when I brushed my teeth and I didn’t bother wiping them off. Just spat out the foam and rinsed and climbed back into my suit to get back to my room. And then I had to take everything off again and then I finally fell into bed. I didn’t even need my Zippo to help me get to sleep.

I needed it less the longer the mission went on. Some of it was I was too fucking tired at the end of the day to think about being wound up or for my brain to keep going and was more than happy to lie down and close my eyes. I wouldn’t spend the entire day running my ass off, not like Scout does or even Medic or Soldier, but – you’re out there, you’re always on guard, you’re always paying attention to what’s going on even if you aren’t going anywhere. There wasn’t any chance to stop if I didn’t want to get sent through respawn. I might not be hauling ass right when-the-fuck-ever every single moment, but at the end of a day when I’d tried not to die too many times I didn’t have any energy or space in my brain to think about needing to flick it open and watch a while.

And I had fire with me the entire day. It wasn’t like carrying around matches or a lighter to get through the day when I’d need reach into my pocket and feel it was there and close by. Here, it wasn’t like that – it was more, it was better. I didn’t have to hide it, or hide that I wanted it. Wanting it, using it, was what they were fucking paying me for.

We were only there another week and a half. Spy had finally grabbed the intel we’d needed, and Demo laid out this beautiful sticky-bomb trap for the Scout running after him, and a few hours after we patched the intel through to RED we got the call back for success. We didn’t ship out for another day, something to do with negotiations, so I finally had a day on the base I didn’t have to spend trying to kill anyone and could just sit back and enjoy it. Most of us spent it cleaning and repairing our weapons, packing up all our stuff for when the scientists would get back and start going with their work again, finally wash our goddamn underwear. I didn’t need to go exploring or anything, I already knew every inch of the base from stalking and chasing BLUs. I was fine with sitting outside for a while and watching the sunset start while Engineer made dinner. Scout came out and joined me after a while and I listened to him run his mouth off until Heavy called us all in. I ate in my room, same as I always did, and hung out in the common room for a while and watched Demo make tea for him and Heavy and Medic. I spent most of it in my room alone. I’d gotten used to the suit and mask – I had to, otherwise I’d have dropped dead after ten minutes of them, I just understood I needed them and let myself sweat and drank water when I could and kept going and I was fine – but it still felt good to get out of them at the end of the day. It felt so goddamn good to lie on top of the covers and let the air go over my skin I didn’t want to fall asleep.

Sniper drove off before anyone else was awake, and Engineer gave me a good-bye handshake before he left. I didn’t have a place of my own yet, so RED sent me back to the training center they’d stashed me right when I’d gotten on their payroll. Their really fucking generous payroll. I didn’t believe it when I saw how much I’d gotten for eighteen days on the field.

“It’s not enough to buy an island, no,” Miss Pauling said. “But certainly, wherever you’d like to live.”

I didn’t have any junk I needed to bring with me that I hadn’t had out at Teufort. I didn’t want to live anywhere near home. Could’ve gone north to Oakland, or even up to Portland or goddamn Seattle, but that’d still be too close. And I didn’t want to live where I’d get stared at.

I kind of wanted to get a swanky hotel room for a few days while I looked for a decent apartment, but high up on the list of things not to do off-mission was attract attention, so I got a room in one of the most boring hotels I could find before I went looking around for my own place. With my paycheck I could’ve gotten a place on Fifth Avenue right by the park and paid monthly rent equal to my parents’ yearly mortgage if I’d wanted. Instead of that, I found a little apartment out past Bedford Avenue, a third-floor walk-up, and put down the deposit in cash just to see the super’s face.

Keeping everything under wraps – hat, sunglasses, scarf, long sleeves and pants, boots, gloves – all year long was going to get attention no matter what, unless I was living out in the middle of nowhere, but then I wouldn’t need to hide anything from anyone so that wouldn’t count. In a city, the attention depended on who else was living there. The city I’d picked had me as just another crazy person who managed to pay their rent on time.

5.

There was three weeks’ downtime before RED called with another mission. They wouldn’t tell me what it was, I had to wait for some in-person briefing bullshit, like they couldn’t send me an envelope with the documents I needed like they did in the movies. I’d even burn them when I was done reading them – I did that with most of my mail anyway, take-out flyers and crap like that. I used a barbeque on the roof. But anything that wasn’t face-to-face was too much of a risk for them, so I went over to their regional office and got my briefing there.

This next mission would have the team on the field longer, at least a month and maybe two, making sure BLU didn’t get the chance to hack into RED’s local network through the control points. We had to keep them off the assigned base’s territory, make sure they couldn’t do any damage to anything, and get everything secured for RED’s scientists to come back and do whatever it was they were doing before BLU made its moves. I’m sure whatever they were doing was goddamn important, but I didn’t give a crap. Miss Jones let me study the map, told me what I needed to do and what I wasn’t supposed to touch, and sent me off to catch a train to catch a train to get me to the base.

I still didn’t have a car. I didn’t have time to grab one and drive off with it – even if I paid cash there was all the bullshit with insurance and driver’s licenses and crap like that, stuff I didn’t want to deal with even if I had the time for it. Besides, I hated driving. People always teased me about that, why was I in southern California if I didn’t like to drive, you shithead, I grew up there, I didn’t move there. And driving a car isn’t anything like putting them back together. An airplane would get me there early, and I wasn’t going to risk my flamethrower banging around in a goddamn cargo hold.

It took me something like half a day and it was worth it to know my flamethrower was right there with me the whole time and that I didn’t have to take anything off for anyone if I didn’t want to. Miss Kendal already knew, so it didn’t matter with her. But people on the trains and in the stations and my teammates, yeah, it fucking did with them.

When I got into the one tiny passenger car, Scout was tapping his feet against the seat in front of him, already waiting for the train to get going. He didn’t notice me, which thank fuck was a good thing since I needed a minute to get the frozen-with-shock-surprise deal out of my system. Thank fuck I’d suited up the minute I was done with the briefing. I wasn’t expecting him or anyone to be there, I’d guessed everyone but me had a car or truck or van. I guessed Scout didn’t either.

He kept tapping his feet, humming something I didn’t recognize, staring out the window, and doing exactly the sort of thing that got him killed on the battlefield over and over, which was pay attention to what was in front of him and not to anyone sneaking up behind him. He did this great little full-body seizure in his seat before he grabbed his hat and jammed it back on his head. “What the hell you doin’, you psycho? Don’t you know don’t sneak up on –”

I laughed and gave him a little wave.

“Pyro! Hey, man, great to see you! What’ya doin’ here, I’d thought you’d be there already, come on sit down.” I got into the seat behind him and set my flamethrower down, and he leaned over the back of his seat and rested his chin on his arms. “So did you hear about the mission, someone already talked to you, right, I hear BLU has a point we gotta catch right when we get there, Engie’s gotta be there by now, he’d better have a dispenser set up ’cause I’m ready to go in swinging full speed ahead you know? Hey!” He opened a window and stuck his head out to yell at the people loading up the freight car behind us. “Don’t forget the cereal, chuckleheads! We ran out after a week last time! Yeah, that’s real mature of you, your ma’d be so proud! Same to you, pal!” He pulled back inside, shook his head, and started going again. “Freaking cereal, that stuff lasts for years I had a box in my room, well my and my sixth-oldest brother’s room until he moved out and then it was mine for like a week until my oldest brother moved back, I hid it under my bed for three years at least and it still tasted fine, come on like RED isn’t rich enough to buy the good stuff that goes bad –”

“Did anyone tell you how long they’d send us out?”

“Huh?”

I tried again, going slower and louder with shorter words like people did with me when they thought I didn’t speak English. “The mission. Did they say how long it will take?”

He wrinkled his nose.

“How long – oh, fuck it.” I slumped back in my seat, crossed my arms over my chest, and glared out the window. When I looked back to Scout he had the weirdest expression – almost soft, kind of confused. I was still pissed but sighed and waved my hand to tell him to go the fuck on and he got what I meant that time and went off again with a smile on his face.

“Anyway, right, so I dusted it off and it tasted okay. It lasts for freakin’ ever if you leave it alone and don’t get it wet, one of the big boxes is breakfast for a week if you’re not sharing, which –”

Nobody else joined us on the car, and after another fifteen minutes the train lurched and we were off. Scout kept talking, but with the train going it was easy to tune him out with all the other sounds when I didn’t feel like listening. I knew he didn’t give a shit if I was listening or not as long as I didn’t interrupt.

He was still going when we got to Badlands after almost two hours, pretty much in the neighborhood of where we’d been last, which was out in the desert in the middle of fucking nowhere. The Badlands base was bigger than Teufort and had a drop-off point right at the edge of the fort, so when the train stopped – no one was driving, the whole thing was automated; Engineer probably knew how it worked but all I knew was the train knew when to stop – we got off inside the fort without having to walk all the way over.

Scout looked around at all the buildings. BLU was supposed to be in the neighborhood so it shouldn’t have been so quiet, and I could tell that bothered him too. “So are we the first ones here?”

“Jesus, I hope not.” I pointed at the half we’d be sleeping in for however long it’d take to cap and keep all five points. “Come on, let’s go look.”

Turned out we weren’t. When we saw Sniper’s van and Engie’s truck parked behind the main dorms, Scout glared at them like they’d insulted his mother. Heavy and Demo were in the kitchen, drinking tea and shooting the shit, and Scout pinched up his face and muttered something I didn’t catch.

“Ah! You make it fine?”

“Yeah, chucklenuts, we’re here all right let’s get it goin’. Hey, is that tea? Come on, man, where’s the hooch?”

“I’ll have ye know I only drink on the job, lad, we’re not fighting the BLUs just yet.” Demo took a long sip from his mug while Heavy laughed and Scout grumbled about it being legal for him to drink in Israel and Canada.

“Yeah, whatever, come on Pyro, let’s get checked in.”

“See you two later.” I waved to them before I left to find the respawn room. It was in a basement near one of the cap points, which I guess made enough sense if RED wanted to make sure at least one was as safe as it could get since BLU needed all five to hack in.

Scout yelled, “Sonofabitch! Sorry.” He sucked on his finger while the system beeped and pinged. “Okay, your turn.”

“Turn around.” I spun my finger in the air to make it clearer; when he didn’t get it I said it again and pushed with the head of my flamethrower to make him move, and then he got it. “And don’t even think about looking.”

“Whatever, man, I ain’t peeking ’till you say it’s cool.”

Even though I knew what it’d feel like it still hurt, and I jammed my glove back on as fast as I could. I still poked Scout with my flamethrower just to see him jump. “Whoa, whoa, don’t do that!”

After we picked out our rooms – stripped down to the goddamn mattresses just like last time – we went back to see who else was around. Engineer was in the big common room picking something out on a guitar. “Oh, hello there. Good to see you two.”

“I didn’t know you played guitar,” I said.

“I’m doing fine myself, ’preciate you for askin’.” He tipped his hardhat at me.

“Hey, Engie, we got like three train cars to unload, you got your truck ready?”

Heavy did most of the work of loading Engie’s truck up and hauling a couple of the bigger crates to the base himself. Some of them weren’t for us so we just stashed those in the back, some of them were basic supplies for the base like laundry detergent, and the rest of it was all for us and our mission. When Spy got to base that night with Soldier and Medic, he and Engineer started huddling over one of the cap-point trigger device things that looked like a shiny metal holder with some wires poking out of the end. I watched them crack one open. When Scout asked what they were doing, Engineer explained he had to take one apart to see how it worked.

I sat down and watched Spy fiddle with some of the smaller parts. “They look like your little sappy thingies.” He looked at me but I didn’t say anything else, so he went back to tugging at the wires.

When Sniper asked how they worked with the cap points, Spy explained it had something to do with blocking access and keeping the packet-swapping secure from outside tampering, and that we needed to make sure they stayed equipped on the points. “The BLU team has similar devices designed to access the data passing through RED’s local network. Should they attempt to do so on a point with one of these equipped, we will know to come running.”

“So how does that all work?” Sniper asked.

Engie smiled. “It’s really simple, actually.” Ten minutes later we all wished Sniper hadn’t asked, because it took Engineer another five minutes to finish, and all we’d learned was that if he said something was simple, no way in hell it was. But it was kind of interesting to lie in bed and imagine the satellites in space holding something invisible together and how I was down here keeping it all safe. Maybe I didn’t understand how it all worked, but that didn’t mean I didn’t give a shit. Then I rolled over and tried to get to sleep.

When I got to the kitchen the next morning I couldn’t figure out why the fuck I felt like smiling. Then I figured I might as well since nobody could see if I was doing it or not to give a shit. Demo was pouring a shot of scrumpy in his morning tea, Scout was hunched over his cereal, Engie was poking at the eggs in the pan, someone had already made coffee, and it felt so damn good to be back even if I hadn’t gotten onto the field yet. I knew we wouldn’t really be on the mission until we were handing the BLUs their asses on a plate, and I didn’t really care, since Medic said good-morning as soon as I came in and Heavy patted my arm with a big rumble when he was coming and I was going.

After I got back to my room I figured it must’ve been Spy: Sniper didn’t make coffee that good. Maybe six months ago I wouldn’t have known what good coffee was, just that it was supposed to be hot and thick.

I was more than ready to move the fuck on with everything, get back onto the battlefield and start carving up BLUs, and I didn’t like waiting but I knew if I ran in without any prep I’d just get a one-way quick-punched ticket to respawn. We knew they’d gotten one of the two points in the north part but not much else, not even which of the goddamn points it was – Badlands was fucking huge, all of Teufort could’ve fit inside of it. Spy and me were doing some recon in the North section, and after an hour and a half of nothing, we found a spot to keep finding nothing from a stationary position for a few minutes. He pulled out his cigarettes and lighter, and I watched him light a new one and sigh at the first drag before I sat down and started adjusting the straps on my oxygen tank.

I looked back when I heard him flick his lighter back open. He lit it, smirked, then tossed it up and caught it while the flame kept going. Then he started twirling it around in his fingers without closing it, letting the flame keep going when it moved. He flicked it closed and started lighting it in all these different ways, backwards and snapping his fingers and spinning it and doing this one finger-twirl where it started at his pinkie and ended between his index and middle fingers. Then he did this thing where he lit it and shut it off and lit it again while he twirled it around in his hand. Then he finally snapped it closed with a flick of his wrist.

“That was fucking amazing!” He couldn’t see me smiling so I applauded instead. I didn’t know how the fuck he’d done any of that, but it was so goddamn awesome I didn’t care. He’d made that little flame dance like it was nothing – he’d made it dance so good, so pretty. I’d never tried to learn any lighter tricks, I’d never wanted to, and even after watching that fucking awesome little show I didn’t really. I just wanted to see him do it again.

He chuckled, slid the lighter back into his pocket, and went back to his cigarette.

I unclipped a thermos from my bandolier and flipped the straw to an open position, then unscrewed the little cover to the straw port, fitted the straw in, and pushed it to my mouth so I could take a drink of water. I heard a snort and looked over at him watching me, and I rolled my eyes and took another big sip before I pulled the straw out and put everything back.

He drew his cigarette out a few more minutes. When he was done he got up, brushed himself off, and started walking without looking back. “Come along, firebug.”

“I’m coming, Jesus.” I grabbed my flamethrower and went on after him.

I didn’t like that he’d gone on ahead and stayed so far in front I couldn’t see him if he went around a corner, but it was good Spy had gone on ahead because him turning around and running like a little girl was a better warning than one of Engie’s little sentries suddenly beeping and laying down some gunfire. I could hear the BLU Medic cackling down the hallway, and I braced myself and waited for the right moment to jump out right behind him with my flamethrower going right on his ass. “Fire in the hole!”

He fucking screamed like a little girl, too. I shot him in the stomach to put him down and looked at Spy. “Goddammit, why do I have to do everything?”

“My appreciations.” He brushed off his sleeves. “This does give us some information.” I had to nod; The shittiest thing was that he was right. If their Medic was around, the rest of the BLUs had got to be nearby. We had about fifteen minutes before the Medic got picked up by respawn, so Spy pulled that disguise from his kit. “I trust you can take care of yourself for a short while?” He sounded just like the Medic, too.

“You bet your fucking ass.”

He held a finger to his lips. “I’ll be back shortly.”

There wasn’t anything I could do except hang around and wait for him. I couldn’t go off on my own because that’d be the absolute shittiest thing I could do. I’d just seen what he’d gotten himself into when there wasn’t someone to cover his ass and he didn’t have time to cloak or disguise himself, and I couldn’t follow him in because that’d just be a fucking billboard he was on RED’s side. So yeah, I waited, and set fire to the Medic’s corpse and put it out a couple of times to have something to do. I had another drink of water and waited some more, and then Spy came out still looking like Medic just as the body shook when respawn finally grabbed it. The disguise puffed in the air a bit when it turned off, and he tucked the case away.

“Shall we return?”

“So what’d you find in there?” He glanced at me and didn’t say anything. “Come on, don’t be a dick about it.” He kept on walking, so I just glared and jogged to catch up to him. Asshole.

We didn’t see anyone else on our way back to base, and waved to Sniper when we got in sight of the battlements. The minute everyone else got back that evening, we all clustered around one of the maps of the base to share what we’d found, show where the BLUs were and which points they’d gotten, use that to plan where they were probably going to go next, form some strategies to win the points back and keep the rest safe.

And sweet mother of fuck, I was ready to get on with them. The little run-in I’d had with the enemy Medic made me remember how great it was to be there, and goddamn it, I’d missed it. We all did, I could tell, Scout fidgeting and Medic smiling and Heavy cracking his knuckles. I was so excited that night I needed my Zippo to help me calm down for the first time in weeks, I was so looking forward to what I knew was coming.

It was fucking worth the wait.

6.

The thing with siege campaigns is that they’re all long-term. You lose some points, you win some back, you do your motherfucking best to make sure you cap all of them and keep them under your control for as long as you can until the voices come on the loudspeakers to let you know you’ve won. It’s not like grabbing intel where suddenly, boom, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am you’re done, everyone’s going home with a big fat bonus for getting it done in under three weeks or suddenly boom, you’ve failed, they know your Grandpa’s secret recipe for Stuffed Fish Balls and your ass is grass. With point control, you know where you’re standing but not where you’ll be tomorrow or next week or the week after that or even how fucking long you’re going to be there. After my first mission capping points, I knew I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them went on for months. My first lasted seven weeks. They weren’t usually that long but four more days and we’d have been there for goddamn Thanksgiving.

Not that anyone but Scout and Soldier gave a shit about that. Even Engie didn’t care too much, he said he was ‘far too busy,’ and I would’ve been happy to think of that fucking day as nothing special and not think about my parents. But if I’d been on the battlefield that Thursday, you bet your sweet cotton-candy ass I’d have been thankful to be there.

There wasn’t a chance to get a routine going, it wasn’t like BLU stole the points one after another the same way each goddamn time. Maybe we’d have a strategy going fine for a week and then they’d change their tactics and we had to move to match them without being able to take a couple hours to talk it over the mess hall table before dinner, just shout and run and try to keep Heavy from getting carved up or give Soldier some cover or hold a point with Engineer.

That day was in the middle of the third week, right when we’d lost the fourth point after just getting it back, and I was on my last fucking nerve and pretty much done with teamwork. Spy wasn’t bothering to pretend he was trying to look out for anyone else, Scout was playing with their Demo without trying to get the fuck down to business and kill him already, and it was just me by the second-closest point to our base no matter how much I called for help.

“Why do I have to do everything? Christ, the point’s right here! Someone get the fuck over here!”

Nobody answered, and I knew I should’ve expected that, and that pissed me off even more, so I did the only thing I could and ran up to try to cap the point myself. It was dangerous, nobody covering for me, but fucking hell someone had to do it and – and then I saw the most goddamn beautiful sight I could fucking imagine, Engineer running towards me with one of his kits and a huge fucking grin. He stopped and set down the kit on the edge of the battlements right in front of the bridge to the point.

“Fuck me sideways, it’s great to see you.”

“I’d say you could use a sentry right about here.” He started pulling the kit into a sentry, grabbed his wrench for the dirty work and chuckled when it stood up on its own maybe a minute after he started – I swear he could make anything from a box of metal, some wires, and spit. “There, that oughta do you.”

With Engie there and the sentry going, I finally had enough cover to run out and try to cap the point. I pulled the little trigger thing out of my pouch, pried off the right panel, and yanked BLU’s own device out of there and threw it away without looking where it’d land. I was paying too much attention to getting mine hooked up to the right wires and shit to flinch when the sentry beeped and hit someone trying to get close. Then everything fit together, I pulled my hands back when it started flashing fast and then slowed down to normal, and then the voice came on the loudspeaker letting everyone know we’d captured the point.

The sentry had taken out their Soldier, and Engineer kicked the body off the bridge. We watched it fall, and the helmet flew off the head when the body finally hit bottom with a huge wet thump. I gave Engie a big thumbs-up. “Thanks for the help.”

“I wouldn’t be so fast to celebrate, we ain’t outta the woods just yet.” He picked up the BLU trigger and then pointed at me with it. “We’re the only ones ’round here, so if we want to keep anyone from grabbin’ this point again we’d better settle in for a nice long day.”

He was right. The announcer let us know when something was going right or wrong, and it let them know how we were doing too. I have no idea how the fuck someone decided it had to broadcast over the whole fucking base, just give us a big red target to go with the company name. If I wanted to be generous, they probably hadn’t thought anyone would be fighting over these and just needed people to come running if something broke – and then I stopped thinking about it when I had to airblast some incoming stickybombs away from the sentry.

We ended up defending the point the rest of the day, just the two of us. The Soldier and the Demo were just the first. Both of them kept trying, and eventually they called in reinforcements. When we heard someone running Engineer just grinned and pumped his shotgun and I aimed my flamethrower and nodded back.

The most they did that day was drive us onto the point and off the bridge, and I got my revenge right away when their little bitch of a Scout came running and I sent him flying into the wall hard enough he didn’t even move when he fell to the floor. He was so out of it I was able to finish him off with my axe without needing to set him on fire or anything. When I was done I looked at Engineer, grinned under my mask, hooked my axe by my leg, and started to pretend to play it like a guitar. And he laughed, so I did it again.

“Ba-waaaanngggg!”

We managed to stay the fuck out of respawn for the rest of the day and keep the point to ourselves, and that was good news for our side of the fight but it wasn’t something we could really celebrate. We were still down three points thanks to BLU, and keeping the ones we’d gotten was an absolute fuck-all of a bitch. But we’d managed to end early that night, so I got more time by myself than I usually did.

I left the window open that night to feel the breezes come through, just lying on top of the covers. I’d already showered and hadn’t gotten my pajamas on yet, and kept moving my hands over my scars. It was almost the end of October, but all my shivering came from touching my burn scars. It wasn’t like I forgot them or ignored them; most days I didn’t give a fuck. They were just there. Wearing a full-body chem suit with a mask and gloves meant none of my teammates knew about them, which meant – and I fucking loved this part – none of them knew they had to give a fuck either. It felt, shit, it just felt nice to not have to think about any of it and just worry about keeping everything covered. This was the first time in my life I’d been able to keep them to myself, and it was goddamn nice to get that. But sometimes it felt good to lie down and stroke them, and think of what happened for each of them, why they were there and how I’d gotten them.

There were a few patches of unburned skin around my chest, and when I moved my hands over them I could feel the scars on them without them catching on anything. Scar on scar always sent something down my spine, and burn on clear skin always moved something sharp in my chest.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it, since the control point I’d capped that day tipped things enough we could go back to offense, which meant getting up at least a half-hour early to go over our new battle strategies. I didn’t get that angry about it – I was still jacked up from capping the point and was ready to sleep anyway. And there wasn’t any way I could’ve guessed that mornings I’d have grabbed a point. So I pulled myself out of the drifting and woke up enough to get ready to go to sleep.

Most days didn’t have that much happening. I mean, there was always something going on, but we didn’t always gain or lose any points, so getting or losing one was a pretty big fucking deal, and we had to move to roll with how that changed things. Going tight on offense meant we’d be stretched thin at the back, which we’d handled fine before, nothing new about that. If we could get BLU to start backing up we wouldn’t need much behind us anyway.

A few days after Engie and I got that point I was deep in BLU’s turf. I’d already managed to pick off their Scout by herding him into a corner, but he’d gotten a couple of good hits with his bat and left me way too weak to keep going on my own, so I had to go find Medic. He was farther back and I didn’t like retreating but I hated respawn even more.

I’d do respawn if I had to, and I’d sent myself through it a couple of times. The medigun didn’t take out shotgun pellets or bullets, just healed everything around them, and I know it was a shitty thing to do if Soldier needed me there with him but I’d rather crap my pants and wake up in respawn than let someone open up my suit. It wasn’t fucking happening. I found Medic under a bridge taking some cover. All the Scout had done was beat on me with his bat a bit, blunt force trauma, perfect for quick repairs, and he understood why I was there right away, flipped the switch and turned the beam onto me. “Thanks, Medic.” I sighed when he turned off the gun, rolled out my shoulders and felt like I’d just woken up from a full night’s sleep. “Oh sweet mother of fuck that’s good.”

He chuckled. “Always a pleasure to heal one who values the service.” I sighed again and nodded, leaned my arm against the wall and turned to let my oxygen tank cradle me. I knew I had to get out, start running back into the fray, move and run and find Scout or Soldier to help me take down their Heavy, but fuck it, I’d earned a few minutes to waste. Besides, if someone came by Medic needed me there to take them out. It made perfect sense to stick with him for a little while. He didn’t look like he minded, so I stayed propped up against the wall listening to things happening somewhere else. It sounded like Demo was having a good day.

A tiny shadow passed over the ground and Medic looked up – not straight up, but sort of up and to the right, and I looked over there too. He smiled. “Ah, a northern goshawk.”

It did look like some sort of bird of prey, but I couldn’t see anything special about it through my mask. I rubbed the top of my mask to press it against my hair. “What’s a goshawk?”

“How do I know? Oh, the shape of the wings, the stripes on the tail. And I’ve seen them before.” We watched it circle around and fly behind one of the buildings. “Most people don’t care much for birds. They say they look too stern, that they have no faces – well, perhaps, a bird has no lips. But,” he looked right at me and smiled, “a bird uses its whole body to say what it might be feeling.”

The hawk circled back around and behind the buildings a couple more times before flapping off somewhere. We waited a bit, listened to the battle get louder and quieter and louder again, and then Medic shook out his arms and stepped out of the shade. “Well, then, shall we return?”

“Fuckin’ a.”

We didn’t grab any points that day but we didn’t lose any either, and we all got a few good kills in. Most of the days were like that. I had the best fucking job in the whole fucking world, and I was always happy to be there no matter what, and at the end of a long day where we were all tired in the locker room or when I dragged myself out of respawn I got a reminder it was still a fucking job.

Sometimes there was time at the end of a day to watch TV with Scout if there was something good on. If there wasn’t I’d usually sit in Engie’s workshop and watch him build things – it was one of the bigger offices none of us used, almost all of the filing cabinets were locked anyway so who the hell knew what it was supposed to be for – or follow him to one of the common rooms where he’d play his guitar, stop in the middle of a song to scribble some notes for some shit he had planned, and then go back to the music. But most nights there was just enough time after dinner to clean my weapons and laugh with Demo and Heavy and maybe Sniper, if the fucker stayed inside after dinner instead of heading right out to his van. I’d wait for everyone to finish with the bathroom so I could shower in private, kick Spy out if I had to, and throw myself into bed before getting up to do it again.

One week we didn’t even get time to clean our weapons. The first week of November BLU finally caught on they was losing and losing hard, and they were doing guerilla strikes like they’d never done before. They’d gone balls-out to the fucking wall to try to drive us back or wear us out. Night fighting’s hard enough but night fighting in a gasmask is next to fucking impossible. I needed to stick to areas with lights to see and that ruined almost every chance I had to sneak up on someone. I couldn’t get out and move around, and had to stay close to the buildings and try to defend as well as I could when people knew I was there, and left the offense to Spy of all people, fucking Spy. He kept smoking and flicking his cigarettes and playing with his lighter, and yeah I liked watching him play with it but come the fuck on, everyone could see him, nobody could miss seeing that little dancing flame, and the fact that he managed to get milled through respawn maybe once a night just made him worse to deal with. Swaggering around like God’s gift to the world with ten-pound testicles.

It lasted for three nights, and holy fuck was I glad when it was over and I finally had the time to take a decent crap. BLU didn’t let up during the day, they just didn’t try to hit as hard. Engie’s dispensers kept us going when we couldn’t stop for anything else, but they never made you feel like you’d really slept or eaten. Soldier kept yelling we didn’t have time to be tired, we would sleep when we were dead and respawn was our alarm clock and we’d return joyful and triumphant and some more shit I didn’t get because I was too busy to listen. I didn’t understand half of shit he was yelling, but as long as he kept that goddamn Heavy busy so I could deal with their Medic, he could yell whatever the fuck he wanted.

BLU didn’t try that again; they saw we knew what we were doing and it probably hit them as hard as it’d hit us. We still stayed up late that fourth night just to make sure, and when I was done prowling around and made it back to my room it was like being back in training; all I took off was my mask before falling asleep. Scout went to bed early for the first two nights after we had our nights back and stayed kind of quiet, but the next week he was back to normal so I guessed the night fighting hit him the worst. We’d napped here and there but we’d all missed so much fucking sleep it wasn’t funny.

The next two weeks we were balls-out offense, and the last two days aggressive defense, and the final hour before BLU turned and ran was the sweetest, hardest hour of the mission. Me and Engie on a point again, spy-checking and both our shotguns out, then running out of respawn with my flamethrower going to get some revenge on their Soldier and his damn rockets. Right after I finished him off and was cheering over the body, the announcer came on to let everyone know we’d secured all the points.

They were out of there by the next morning. We had three days before we needed to clear out, and I spent most of the first one doing jack shit, just walking around and playing catch with Scout and listen to him bitch about almost missing Thanksgiving. When they started migrating over, Sniper shot down a couple of geese, and we roasted them for dinner to celebrate our last night there.

Things were the same as I’d left them back in Brooklyn, like they didn’t know what was really going on in the world. They probably didn’t. I hadn’t tried to talk to anybody for longer than it took to buy something or pass them on the stairs and I still didn’t say anything if I didn’t have to but just walking around in the crowds felt so fucking weird. What the fuck was I supposed to talk to them about? I knew they didn’t know, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel about that. Pity, I guess. It wasn’t like I could talk to them about any of it anyway, not if I didn’t want to break my contract.

I loved being in my apartment – my own bathroom, my own bedroom, I could walk around in shorts and a t-shirt and go to the bathroom whenever I wanted – but when I got a call maybe two weeks after I got back, I was so fucking ready to go.

7.

It was another intel capture mission way out in the middle of nowhere that we had to get to by train. I’d swear RED had a fetish for them, but Heavy figured it was just a way for our bosses to keep things simple and safe; it wasn’t like someone could drive over and sneak in at night if there weren’t any roads so we’d hear them coming from miles away. He’d beat both me and Scout to the train, reading some tiny book he put away when I got aboard to talk to me instead. I knew I shouldn’t try to say too much – his English and my mask made just about everything I tried to say to him except maybe ‘shoot him’ and ‘thank you’ into fucking dolphin noises.

He seemed happy to keep talking about where he’d gone during the downtime, symphonies and operas and art museums and it sounded boring as shit until he started talking about the old armor and weapons they had on display. “Such beautiful cannons. So lonely, they never shoot them anymore, not even to show for special parties. But still, kept clean and dry – I know retired soldiers who live worse.” He chuckled. “I offer, I would clean them, would take them out to show, but they say no, too old. This, I ask why, age does not matter for good make, they still say no. Feh.” He flexed his arms and cracked his knuckles. “Beautiful cannons deserve to be shot.”

“Wouldn’t Sasha get jealous?” He looked blankly from across the train. I pointed behind us to the luggage in the back of the car and said it again. “Sasha. Sasha.”

“Oh, Sascha? Yes! Guns much like Sascha, very good work on them too, not so old, but still say no.” I shrugged and sat back in my seat.

Scout showed up a little later, then Demo, and it was the same as last time with just Engie and Sniper driving in and everyone else on the train. When we finally got there, I thought it might be worth it to see if RED could get me some fake paperwork for a driver’s license since Engie already had his workshop set up. It’d be nice to arrive early next time and not have to fight Spy for the only bedroom on the entire fucking base with a goddamn lock.

“We do not have, what is it called, dibs? It is first come and first served, and I arrived here prior to you.”

“No, we don’t have fucking dibs, nobody called anything ahead, but I’m not sleeping in a room without a fucking lock. So get the fuck out.”

He shrugged and put his suitcase down on the bed. I grabbed it and threw it out the door.

“Crazy imbecile! Now look at me, you little firebug –”

“No! Fuck you, you fucking dickhead, I need this room more than you do! So shut the fuck up and get the fuck out!”

“Perhaps if I could understand what you are saying we might have a reasonable discourse,” he grinned with all eighty-seven of his teeth. “Maybe if you removed that mask of yours?”

“GET THE FUCK OUT!” I was so goddamn mad I was fucking shaking. Everyone else was watching us at that point, some of them staring openly and some of them just confused, and I glared at them. “What the fuck do you fuckers want?”

“Ah, mon laborer, you seem to have a kinship with our deranged colleague, perhaps you could explain why they are in the wrong.” I sat down on the bed and held my flamethrower to my chest, shook my head and kept glaring.

He took off his helmet and rubbed a hand over his shiny head. “Spy, I don’t know how to argue with this.”

Spy crossed his arms, and I gripped my flamethrower tighter. “Explain.”

“Well, it seems that if this room and this room alone is so important to Pyro, it’ll be best for everyone if you just find another place to sleep, ’cause he doesn’t look like he’s budging.”

“Fuck no.”

Spy looked at me, at Engineer putting his helmet back – Sniper blank-faced like usual, Scout and Demo all confused and Medic almost curious – and sneered. “Very well.” He delicately walked out, picked up his suitcase, and went down the hall. “À bientôt, you shambling monstrosity.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

As soon as I was alone with the door locked I ripped off my mask and grabbed my Zippo. I tried to pay attention to the flame but couldn’t stop thinking – what if Spy had gotten the room and not me? If we’d had to, I don’t know, fucking arm-wrestle for it or everyone teamed up against me or I got here too late to make any sort of argument, shit. Maybe I’d finally learn how to sleep with my mask on and only take it off for an hour at one in the morning when I took a shower. Maybe I’d figure out how to use a chair to brace the door like they did on all the spy TV shows so I could eat without getting paranoid.

I turned it back on and watched it go and thought about Spy’s tricks and tried to think of something else. The flame kept dancing, curving around and into itself and unfurling back open, and I blew on it a little to make it move a bit more and tried to remember why I was here and not a prison or psych hospital. I slid my fingers through the flame, fast so they wouldn’t get bit.

I flicked the flame off and turned it back on. Maybe I could beat him at arm-wrestling, it wasn’t like he ran around with a flamethrower and axe all day, the heaviest thing he carried was his revolver. I flicked the flame off and turned it back on and watched it dance. It was working, but not enough – it would’ve felt so fucking good to burn something bigger, some junk mail or build a bonfire out in a field or set the whole foothills alight like that one year. The entire base was made of wood, and there was the infirmary and my oxygen tank and the spare gasoline and Engineer’s whole fucking lab and the gasoline from the truck and van, and I clicked my Zippo off and on and off and clenched my hands around it. The guy behind the counter didn’t see me come in, he hadn’t noticed me doing anything even when I’d taken it off the rack and put it in my pocket, and if he had, he didn’t give a shit when I walked out of the store without paying for it.

I ate alone in my room that night, same as always, and didn’t give a flying fuck that the conversation stopped when I’d gone into the kitchen to get a goddamn bowl of soup. Everyone was out of the kitchen when I went in to wash my stuff, and Engineer came by when I was almost done with the bowl.

“Evening.”

“What is it.”

“Heck of a way to get back to work.” I started scrubbing the spoon. “Spy – he ain’t a bad sort, really, he just likes pushing people.”

“It’s fine, Engie.”

He tried again. “He does it to all of us, so don’t think he’s singlin’ you out. It ain’t nice or polite, but it’s his way, and the best thing for it’s just to leave him be. He’s a snake-bellied coward, but he’s our snake-bellied coward, and we gotta at least tolerate the man on account of the team.”

“Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind.” I started to fill up my thermoses. “It’s not like the rest of you fuckers give a shit.”

“Glad t’hear it.” He slapped me lightly on the shoulder. “Remember, plan review’s at seven-thirty sharp, and breakfast’s an hour before that.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“See y’tomorrow, Pyro.”

“Good night, Engie.”

When I finally crawled into bed my mind was still jerking around all over the place and wouldn’t settle, fuck, but for once I was too goddamn tired for that to stop me from getting to sleep. So I got under the covers and thought about old brushfires and waited for morning.

When we got our first-day recon teams I sat next to Scout who took the goddamn hint and let Demo spend the day with Spy. I liked Demo fine, the guy knew his way around explosions better than most of the fuckers I’d hung out with years ago, but I knew Spy didn’t, and laughed at the face he made when Demo gave him a good slap on the back and said something way too Scottish for me to understand. Something about motherfucking pixies. When we went to see what the fuck was going on outside of our part of the fort, we’d been out maybe a half-hour when Scout looked up and screamed at the BLU Soldier yelling at us from the peak of a rocket jump. Scout jumped back; I stood my ground, pulled out my flamethrower, airblasted him off course and let it roar. The Soldier fell down like a fucking meteorite, and when he landed Scout used his pistol to finish him off just when he started charging, still on fire. God, what a fucking lunatic.

“Come on, let’s keep going, there’s gotta be something from where he came from, let’s move it, Mumbles.”

“Gimme a minute.” I took one more look at the blue fabric of the Soldier’s uniform burn and curl and sighed all happy before I looked back at Scout. “Now I’m ready.”

That night I went out looking for Sniper, and when I passed Engie’s lab I got a bit of what he was saying to Demo: “So he needs his privacy, we all do, ain’t nothing with needing more –” I kept on going since they might’ve been talking about him. I found him out in his van, and it didn’t take long to explain what I wanted since all I needed to do was run my fingers up and down the head of my axe.

“So’s long as I’m there,” he shrugged, and followed me back inside to the lounge where he kept reading some big fat book and I sharpened my axe with his whetstone. I couldn’t take off my gloves to feel how I was doing, so I kept going until I knew I’d done a decent job – and I stayed sitting on the couch with nothing to do, just to prove some fucking point to anyone who might come in and see me sitting there. Even if nobody came in I knew I wasn’t getting frightened into holing myself up somewhere for some goddamn stupid reason. I turned on the TV to watch whatever came on, and Sniper glanced at it before going right back to his book.

It was like the last time we’d capped intel since BLU wanted our stuff just as much as we wanted theirs. Something about the fucking six-story rockets stationed here that I didn’t really need to give a crap about. Launch codes, schematics, what-the-fuck ever, I wasn’t going to read it anyway. Theirs or ours, it didn’t matter. Besides, it was all on reel-to-reel this time so I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to. All we could do with it was patch it through to our bosses to make sure we’d grabbed what they’d asked us to get.

That intel cap took us longer than it did the last time, fourteen days instead of ten. We knew what we were doing, and so did BLU. That fucker of a BLU Spy managed to get in and grab some of our intel twice in the second week, which was just goddamn embarrassing and almost cost us the mission since he knew what we were keeping safe. The first time would’ve been the end of the mission if Demo hadn’t gotten him halfway across the fort with a fucking beautiful sticky-bomb trap. I was there when it went off and close enough that some of the Spy landed on my mask, and I didn’t have time to laugh because I had to grab the intel – it’d landed in something soft, I think it was his lungs – and play keep-the-fuck-away-from-me with the rest of the BLUs out on the field until I got it back safe. It took forever to clean the crap off my mask that night, but it’d been worth it.

The second time would’ve kicked us out early if Scout hadn’t managed to get inside the BLU base right before they patched the intel through, grab it back, and get his ass back to our turf with me and Sniper laying down cover fire on everyone chasing after him. Spy claimed it was his idea to give up our intel long enough for him to get over to their side and grab what we needed when their side was distracted, but I didn’t buy it. Some days we could follow our plans without anything going wrong, and most days everything changed every ten minutes and we had to scramble to keep up. You learn to improvise when you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Just hold tight and weather the fucking storm until you get the all-clear and you can all go home.

The night before we all cleared out I was packing my stuff back up and knocked my extra pair of boots to the back of the shelf in the closet when I tried grabbing them from the floor. When I stood on the chair and started feeling around to try to find them I touched something I didn’t remember putting up there, something kind of soft. I hadn’t put anything but my boots up there, so whoever’d used this room last was missing something. When I pulled it out to see what it was, I had to get off my feet and sit on the chair to stare at it.

Whoever’d slept in this room before me was missing a purse. Or maybe way before me, the thing was pretty goddamn dusty. The purse wasn’t very big, way too fucking pink with a huge flower on each side, and it was empty except for some tampons and tissues. Someone’s emergency stash.

A purse here was pretty goddamn strange, but that wasn’t the problem. I knew RED had women on its payroll since the first person from RED I fucking talked to was Miss Pauling. There wasn’t any reason RED wouldn’t send a woman out here if there was one who could do the job they needed her to do. And nobody gave a shit if we brought personal items to a base with our uniforms and weapons. Engie had his guitar and Scout had his rosary and photos and Medic had his binoculars and bird guides, we all had stuff. But people were usually better about taking their stuff with them – there wasn’t anything in the desk, and I’d checked behind the drawers in the dresser when I’d put my shirts away and under the mattress when I’d made the bed. And the purse was really goddamn dusty. So it probably wasn’t the person right before me. Maybe two or three people before me, someone who’d lived in here way behind me was missing a purse, and everyone who’d slept in this room between them and me didn’t know about it. Since I’d found it, I knew I could count it as part of my personal crap, take it home with me if I wanted.

I looked around the room, at the desk and chair and bed and the window I wasn’t opening in December. I’d started waking up to frost on it, and didn’t want to think about what it’d be like in New York. It’d snowed twice before I left but nothing heavy and none of it stuck around more than a couple of days, and the big international news forecast from the last time Engie took over the TV said the weather there was finally getting into winter. I hadn’t had time to think about what was going on outside of the base, anything that didn’t have fuck-all to do with the mission. I just didn’t. I rubbed my hands over the purse and looked back out the window. I needed to strip the bed and toss all the sheets and crap in the laundry in the morning, erase everything that said I’d been in here.

And that meant I had to take the fucking purse.

It wasn’t snowing in New York right when I got back, but two days later for Christmas the city got eight inches dumped in four fucking hours and the whole place shut down until they could clear the streets. I watched the ploughs go by from the front steps, and didn’t give a shit that everyone thought it was weird I was excited to see them. They didn’t ask me, so I didn’t tell them I’d grown up where you had to travel to see snow, so I’d never seen anything people used to clear it.

When 1967 was ready to leave, even though it was cold as balls I went out to Prospect Park to watch the fireworks close-up. Then 1968 came in, and it was about two weeks old when I got called back to the field.

8.

When I signed the lease for another year, I went back, did the math, and figured out I’d only been in my apartment for three months total from the last twelve. I wasn’t surprised – working for RED was like being a doctor on call where they can call you whenever the hell they want and who knows when the fuck your shift’s over – but it did make me think that I didn’t do much when I was there except leave for a mission or get some take-out, so maybe I should get around to spending some time in the city and see what there was to do in it. I’d gotten back two days earlier, and there was always at least a week of downtime, so I figured I might as well see what was out there.

It turned out there was a shitload of stuff to do in New York City. There were all the zoos and movie theaters, and the natural history museum, plus the parks and the ferries and the aquarium and amusement park out on Coney Island. Dressing up to go out in the city wasn’t as easy as just putting on my mask and chemsuit, but it was worth it for the roller coasters and giraffes. People ignored huge scars and looked around me like I didn’t fucking exist, but when I was dressed for winter they’d pay attention to me, even if I did it in the middle of goddamn August.

I spent one day just wandering around Brooklyn – I took the subway almost all the way up and walked back down to my apartment to see what was on the way – and by the time I got back, I couldn’t wait for the next mission. There was one military surplus store I’d wandered into just because it was there, and when I left I had a fucking gorgeous nearly-brand-new bright and shiny flare gun ready and waiting for the field. I hadn’t been so excited for a mission in months. We’d gotten our asses handed to us twice in a row, goddamn BLUs choking us off and forcing us away from all five access points just long enough to patch on through to RED’s network. Both fucking times. If they did it again it’d just be embarrassing, and at first I thought a flare gun would give me a bit more to work with to keep that from going down.

That night I realized it wouldn’t be, and went out to the nearest junkyard to fix that. I could’ve called RED to let them know what I needed delivered at the base for the next mission, but I wanted to do it myself again. Even if I’d have to wait for Engineer to set up his lab to put it together.

After I got all the stuff I needed plus some extra just in case, I stopped in a graffiti store to pick up some paint.

Three days later I got a call that sent me to a two-point control-point base up in the mountains somewhere – RED was passing data through its network and whatever it was this time was only going through once, so we had to keep BLU off just long enough for RED to get clear. RED’s latest project would be done in two weeks, so we didn’t have a lot of time, and this time we knew it. If we lost a point we had to get the fucker back right away, and if we lost either for more than a couple of hours we’d lost everything. BLU would probably go guerrilla again when they got desperate, which was just fucking beautiful. I’d kissed real sleep good-bye until I got back to fucking Brooklyn.

Nobody bothered anyone’s routine for what they did first thing when they got to base after respawn check-in. Engie set up his lab as soon as he parked his truck, Heavy went through the kitchen, Scout made his bed, and Soldier went out back to dig a foxhole. Sniper found the best spots for perching, Medic went through the infirmary’s inventory, Demo nailed a horseshoe over his door, and Spy disappeared and reappeared in one of the common rooms a few hours later. I found a room where I could lock the door.

The second thing I did after I unpacked everything was find Engie’s lab. He wasn’t busy, just going over a couple of teleporters, and smiled when I came in.

“Well, hello there. What’s got you payin’ me a visit?”

“You said I could use your workshop if I ever needed to.” I set the box of junkyard crap down on one of the cleaner tables and started taking stuff out. “I was hoping you could give me a hand with this shit.”

“Sorry?”

“Can I borrow some of your tools?”

“Would you mind terribly repeatin’ that?”

Oh, fuck it. I pointed at his little welding torch. “Can I use that?”

“You want – oh, by all means. Let’s make some space for that, that, whatever it’s going to be.” He hopped off his stool and started to help me clear the rest of his shit off the table.

“It’ll be a new flamethrower.”

“Will it be a new flamethrower?”

“Christ, Engie, I just said that.”

He stopped coiling up wire to take a closer look at what I’d set out, leaned one arm against a table and put his other hand on his hip. “Don’t you already have one of those? It won’t be a redundancy?”

“Yeah, but this one’s got a different design for fuel system. It’ll burn a hell of a lot harder and faster than my old one.” I held up two smaller piece of metal and chuckled and jabbed them towards Engie. “This’ll be the head.”

If that bugged him it didn’t show through the goggles. “You seem to know what you’re doing. How’s about I keep on over here and let you get to it?”

“Fuck yes, thank you.” I threw him a thumbs-up and went to gather up the tools I needed. All I’d had last time was what RED had around, and sure they had access to a fuckton more than what Engie had in here, but I could tell everything he used was as well maintained and cared for as I could fucking hope for. I set everything out, lit the torch, and let it breathe for a moment before getting to work. I’d already made a flamethrower so I knew what I was doing, so it only took me working through dinner to put it all together. Engie asked me to come, but I told him I was busy and showed him what I was doing to get him to understand. He said he’d save me a plate and left me alone in his shop.

It was kind of funny – not funny laugh-out-loud, but funny-fucking-weird – that back at the garage, even if someone came in and saw me doing bodywork or elbow-deep in an engine, they never believed I really knew what I was doing and always asked for someone who they thought looked like a real mechanic. It was like they thought I’d been posing for a goddamn magazine instead of doing my fucking job of fixing someone’s car, which was one reason I never talked to customers much. But here, nobody did that. Nobody thought I wasn’t supposed to know how to weld metal or put a flamethrower together. Here, they didn’t know what was under my mask, so they didn’t judge me on anything except what I could do, and what I did.

I had to wait until the next night to do the painting. Sure, I could weld with my goggles and gloves on just fucking fine, but if I wanted to get some paint on without messing it up or getting any on my gloves, I really had to see what I was doing. And that meant I couldn’t do it in front of anyone. Well, I could do the sanding out in public, but I figured I’d spent the day fending off guerrilla attacks and breaking in my flare gun and deserved a couple of hours alone. I’d grabbed some cups from the kitchen, set them out next to the extra towels, got out the paints, and got the fuck to work. We were way up North in summer so it got light early and didn’t get dark for hours, so by the time BLU was done for the day we were ready to pass out too. But I had to do it anyway, I didn’t care I was losing sleep I needed, I needed to finish it even more. One late night and it’d be done. I needed it more than a shower.

When I finished the eyes, I blew on the paint to help it dry and set it down on the floor. I knew it wasn’t a good dragon head, but horns would get in the way and I couldn’t tape whiskers onto the muzzle without them burning off the first time I lit it up. And if I really wanted it to be right, it’d blow clouds, not fire, but I knew nobody else here would know the fucking difference.

I lay on my chest, reached out and stroked it from the bed, and closed my eyes so I could feel the cold metal on my scars. It wasn’t right, but it was perfect. And when I brought it with me for the morning’s plan review, everybody wanted to see it. We didn’t get lots of new weapons, so whenever someone got their hands on one we all wanted to take a look.

Demo recognized it right away, the minute I set it down on the table. I didn’t think anybody would, but I put it down, he looked at it, and at me. “You made yourself a dragon, didn’t you?”

“Well – yeah.” I nodded hard in case he hadn’t heard me right. “You like it?”

“Noble beasts! Th’ wild ones are all but extinct, an’ thank heaven f’r that, th’ world ain’t suited for such grand monsters any longer. Ah, tiny little pets for dukes and queens, sad what’s become of them.” He laughed quietly and took another drink.

Soldier grumbled, “This isn’t one of your little pixie stories. This is war, maggot, and while the scale may be minor in comparison to the greater Western Front, it is still deserving of your respect.”

“Aye, you and your prancin’ are doing it the dignity it well deserves.”

“My prancing as you call it does not result in my inconvenient respawning when I am to be properly focused on the battle at hand!”

“You got a problem with my drinkin’? You say that t’my face.”

“I’m not hinting, implying, or insinuating, I am stating outright –”

Oh, Jesus, not this again. Soldier and Demo could argue for hours if nobody got in and told them to shut the fuck up. That was usually Heavy, but I was way too fucking tired to wait for someone to say something, so I took my flamethrower, pointed it at the ceiling, braced myself, and let it roar.

“Not inside!” Scout screeched.

When I sat back down everyone was staring at me, Soldier and Demo had stopped yelling at each other because Soldier was yelling at me now, and I didn’t give a shit. He’d done this before and he was always done in a couple of minutes. When he finished with some commentary about how I never showered with anyone else we were finally able to go over the day’s battle strategies.

I’d spent most of the first day at Gorge with Engie looking around for good defense spots. The way this mission would play out I’d be spending more time on defense and had to get to know the base better than I knew my goddamn apartment, and I’d be sticking with Engie for most of it. He was picking out the best spots for sentries and teleporters, and hung back when I’d go on ahead to make sure the next area we checked out was clear. He was having fun, humming something I’d heard him play, and I was doing okay but the day didn’t really get going until I thought I saw something shimmer and checked to make sure it wasn’t just light hitting my mask.

“Gotcha, motherfucker!”

The BLU Spy started running the second his cloak stuttered and I took off right after him. Engie was hollering behind me and I didn’t listen, just kept chasing the Spy out into the open – I hadn’t gotten him on fire, just airblasted him to show his disguise, and with his head start I couldn’t hit him until I realized I was being a fucking idiot, pulled out my flare gun, and missed by a fucking mile. I shot at him again, Soldier’s old lessons on aiming while running ringing in my ears, and that time I got him good. He shouted something in French and stumbled to his knees. By then we were out in the open over the bridge, and before he got a chance to get up I pulled out my axe. It didn’t take much to put him down, and when I turned around and saw Engie was there, did the fucking axe guitar thing again just to show off.

Then we got the fuck out of dodge, because staying out in the open like that was just asking the BLU Sniper for a fucking headshot and it was way too early for a respawn headache. When we were back inside, he asked to see my flare gun, and I handed it over.

“Now ain’t that nifty.” He gave it back along with a grin. “I’d wondered where your shotgun went, and this seems it’s a fair trade.”

“That’s for fucking sure.”

After the paint dried on my new flamethrower and I learned how to use it to make everyone shut the fuck up, it was ready to get onto the battlefield. I was still with Engie, keeping him safe while he set everything up. He never put anything up the day before the fighting started, just the day of. He kept saying there was too much risk leaving them out because anyone could come by and smash them, or come by and learn where they were, leave them alone, and tell everyone else what they’d found and basically make them useless until he scrapped them up to move them somewhere else. Half the time he cleared them out at the end of the day for pretty much the same reason, but the way this mission would play out, he probably wouldn’t get the chance.

Thanks to the late-night painting I was pretty much running on empty, but it was the good kind of empty since I was so fucking tired there wasn’t a single fucking thing going on in my head that didn’t have anything to do with keeping Engie safe and our base BLU-free. I’d taken a cue from Sniper and filled one of my thermoses with coffee, and when Engie finished up a sentry and started up on a teleporter I finally took a minute to have some, and sweet mother of fuck it was good. I drank about half of it, licked my lips, and saw Engie resting an elbow on the sentry and waiting for me. I pulled the straw out from under my mask and offered him the thermos. “Want some?”

“Why thank you.” He chugged the other half and burped. “’Scuse me.” I clipped the thermos back onto my bandolier and we were off again.

I didn’t get a chance to use my new flamethrower for hours, not until the BLU team got its head out of its ass and decided to fuck with us. I’d run off from Engie when the sirens for the first point started going, and the guy needed my cover but points wouldn’t respawn if something went down. Demo had already sailed in and set up traps around the good hiding spots, and I heard them go off just when I saw a Scout’s hand go flying. I got there right as Demo tried to sticky-jump through the air to land on the BLU Heavy and got shattered by the minigun for yelling where he was coming from and ruining the fucking surprise – and it left the Heavy wide open in back and perfect for me to get my ass in there and let my flamethrower roar.

He fucking ignored being on fire and I scrambled out of the way and hid my ass under the bridge, under the point, when I heard his minigun rev up. Then I heard their Medic’s laugh come in, and I knew the minigun was out there and probably the Heavy’s shotgun too, but motherfucker, there was never a good time for a fucking suicide run. I crouched down and sneaked over to the other side.

“Hey!” I screamed when I jumped back out. “Better watch your fucking back!” I airblasted and hit the Medic face-on, threw him right on his ass and the medigun’s blue ribbons of healing ripped apart like curtains in a burning house. He was about to say something when I let my flamethrower go and got him flaming and got him good.

“Fire, fire fire!”

“We know, dumbass!”

I didn’t see the punch come, just felt it hit me and send me flying on my feet and heard the Heavy shout, “I am going to kill you, and kill you, and kill you!” My flamethrower, fuck fuck fuck, I’d dropped it and I had to get it but he punched me again when I tried to run. I pulled out my flare gun and at that range and with a target like a Heavy there was no way I could fucking miss. It hit him right in the chest and he reared back and shouted again, “My flesh, it burns!”

I had maybe three seconds to get my flamethrower back but I only needed two, so I used the third to laugh when I saw the tiny red dot on his forehead right before it exploded and he fell over. I turned to wave to where I thought Sniper might be, then realized that was begging for the other one to get a good headshot in and jumped back down under the bridge right when I heard Soldier rocket-jump in and land right on the point.

There wasn’t time to retreat for anything, not even when Scout was shooting baseballs into skulls from across the yard to keep their Demoman busy and Sniper was keeping their Sniper occupied and I had to make sure their fucking crazy Soldier didn’t get fucking close to our point. They didn’t let up for a goddamn minute, and I had to make time when I started to hallucinate, I was that fucking tired and ready to crash, and the coffee was fucking hours ago. Engie had set up a dispenser right inside our base for this sort of emergency, and holy shit was I happy to see it. I leaned up against it and let it do its magic, and I was this close to humping the fucking thing, it felt so goddamn good.

BLU did lay off that night, way after their Sniper got me good and I had a run-in with their Scout where I woke up in respawn after he got me with that shotgun, but both points were still ours, and that was what counted. I was so fucking tired I barely had time to fall asleep; I just got into bed and boom, out for the night.

It almost felt like enough when I woke up. Even if it hadn’t been, if it’d been the last night with maybe four hours, I still would’ve been ready to hit the ground running. I owed that Scout of theirs a new asshole, and the sooner I gave him one the better.

I had to wait two days for it but fuck, it was worth it. I’d had my hands full with BLU’s Spy – he’d been sapping as much of Engie’s stuff as he could and fucking telefragged him twice when he tried to pop over to fix something, and that shit doesn’t fucking fly if I’m around to stop it. He’d sap something and disappear and didn’t have the decency to laugh and let me know where he was, completely fucking frustrating, and it somehow worked out he was about to sap an exit when I came through with my flamethrower already going and the look on his face right before he went up told me he’d shit his pants.

It just took a couple of whacks with my axe to send him to his team’s respawn. I nudged a burning leg with my boot and let it drop back down. “I really didn’t think you’d get killed like that.”

Then I got hit with a baseball. And then a fucking baseball bat.

“Yo, batter up!”

The little shitbag Scout cackled when he ran past me to grab the ball and hit me again before he ran back to wherever the fuck he was trying to hit me from. I couldn’t fucking see straight and was almost out of ammo, but I heard where he was yelling from and blinked away the stars, planted my feet and right before it came I blasted his fucking baseball right back in his face. It went all the way past him and he actually fucking turned around to see where it went. “Hey, what – that ain’t fair!” Fuck me, but it too was goddamn hilarious to see him take a minute to decide if he was going to run for the ball or back at me, and I had to laugh. That did it, got him running to me with the bat swinging in the air, and the little fucker pulled out his pistol, missed my head and got me in the chest.

Motherfucking goddammit – fuck! There was blood in my mouth but I wasn’t on my way to respawn so he’d missed everything important enough to knock me off right there. He was far enough away it felt more like getting punched than getting shot, but it’d kick in that I’d gotten fucking shot in maybe a minute, less now that he was running closer, thank you, little fucker.

Never, ever, ever run at someone holding a flamethrower.

When he fell over burning, I started to laugh, then fell to my knees and started to cough when it hit me I’d gotten shot.

“Hey, hey, you all right?” Engie was right there next to me, his hand on my shoulder. “That Scout got you good but you got him better, got nothin’ to worry about, I’ll get Medic and –”

I grabbed his pistol from his belt and shot myself in the head. Respawn always made me think I’d crapped my pants and always took at least ten minutes, but it was better than letting Medic take off my suit to open me up.

Our sixth day we lost the first point twice, and again on the eighth, but only for like ten fucking minutes each time. On the ninth we lost the point inside our goddamn base for almost fifteen minutes when BLU finally went guerilla on us – but on the eleventh day we got a call from RED who told us the data transfer thing had worked just fine and we’d done our jobs to keep the network safe. So besides the professional pride in doing our fucking jobs, we had three days of the fort to ourselves before we needed to ship out.

Getting a fort to ourselves for a few days after a mission is almost exactly like the last days of school before summer vacation. We didn’t have anything we needed to do but we still had to stay put, so we could finally relax and enjoy where we were. All we could really do was wait for the time to be up for us to go home. The biggest difference was the team didn’t go toilet-papering anything. We’d clean our guns, catch up on sleep, finally take a long hot shower and sleep some more, and maybe give Engie a hand when he had to repair his truck. Why the BLU Spy sapped Engie’s fucking truck, who knows, he probably did it for shits and giggles.

“No-good sneaky – yeah, the black ratchet, thanks – backstabbing cowardly – you got the needle-nose pliers, much appreciated – how he messed up hardware, I almost gotta give him credit – oh, hi Scout.”

I gave him a wave. He nodded back, flapped out his hat. “Hey, you seen Spy around? He borrowed my bag yesterday, and he ain’t been around to give it back.”

Engie shrugged. “Can’t say I’ve seen him, sorry.”

“Isn’t he still sleeping?”

Scout waved off my question. “Who knows with him. I’ll ask Heavy, catch you later.” He jammed his hat back on and ran off to the base.

“I wonder what he thinks I asked him.”

Engie just asked me for a ball joint separator.

We didn’t see Spy until late that afternoon when he walked past the common area into the kitchen with Scout’s bag hanging off his shoulder, clearly full of something. Demo looked up from his tea and asked, “An’ where’ve ye been?”

Spy smiled. “Fetching dinner. Now, if none of you mind, I’ll take the kitchen to myself and would prefer to not be disturbed.”

I watched him leave. “Don’t we still have some rabbits in the freezer?”

“Maybe some berries. Saw some bushes ’round the back the first day, never got a chance to see if they’d got anythin’.”

I crossed my arms and went back to watching TV. There was nothing but crap and worse crap on the four stations we got up there, so I left Demo to nap and went to my room to redo some of the paint job in peace.

He’d been right: Spy had gotten some blackberries, and he’d washed and chilled them for dessert. He’d gotten some greens too, and some wild herbs, but he could’ve gotten fucking anything since it’d been almost two weeks since we’d seen anything fresh. The fucker got off on us enjoying it and thanking him – well, I ate in my room and just told him to fuck off when he asked me how I’d liked dinner. But Heavy was chatting with him in French when I came in for my plate, and Scout asked for seconds before I left, so I didn’t really need to guess what everyone else said. Suck-ups.

The blackberries were fucking tasty, though. I did have to give him that.

9.

It was a few months before we got to another mountain fort, and when we did we weren’t even supposed to be there. After Gorge it was Turbine, Gravel Pit, Fastlane, boom boom boom and just a fucking week’s downtime in between each of them, and then we got sent to Sawmill. We’d all gotten told we were there to grab some intel BLU had on its half of the base, but when we got there nobody was guarding it, and we didn’t know what the fuck was happening but figured we might as well grab it and go home early.

Ten minutes after Spy patched it through we got a call from headquarters that told us the job had gotten taken care of, that the bureaucracy had finished its high-energy light bulb manufacturing plan negotiations three days ago and nobody bothered to fucking tell us until we’d already checked into respawn and unpacked our stuff. Oh, and they hadn’t gotten around to telling the scientists before they’d all left for us to move in, so we were fucking stuck out there with nothing to do and no one to fight for three weeks. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but Miss Terry really did sound like she meant it when she apologized for the inconvenience.

“Fucking bureaucracy,” I muttered.

When Spy turned off the screen, we all stood there and stared at it after it went dark.

Heavy asked, “So what should we do now?”

“Whatever the hell we want, dumbass,” Scout answered. “We got the place to ourselves for three weeks, and I dunno ’bout you guys, but I’m not gonna waste any time standin’ around wonderin’ what to do. Later.”

Spy nodded. “A few days relaxing would do us all quite well.”

“Might be nice t’see about some sentry upgrades,” Engie murmured.

“Heavy, I believe you still owe me that chess rematch.”

“‘I rather would entreat thy company to see the wonders of the world abroad, than, living dully sluggardized at home, wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness!’ Shakespearicles said that, and he managed six plays a year while still finding time for barehanded bearbaiting. I’d say that’s advice worth following!”

“I been meanin’ to catch up on some letters f’r back home. Might be nice.”

“Say, Pyro, y’mind lendin’ me your axe?”

Everyone else looked at Sniper like he’d asked for a tuning fork and a jar of honey, but I didn’t know what their fucking problem was. We’d all checked into respawn anyway. “Well sure.”

Back in my room, he hefted it and made a couple of small practice swings, I guess to measure it against his kukri. He nodded and smiled, “Cheers, mate.” When he left for what-the-fuck-ever he was planning on doing – it didn’t really matter as long as he didn’t break it, and I’d seen how he treated his own weapons so it wasn’t like I couldn’t trust him with my shit – I went to go find Scout. He was up on a roof and yelled at me to join him.

“We had some furlough days back when I was in trainin’. It’s kinda like a vacation.” We were on the edge of the roof of our intel room, looking out at the mountains and forest, and it was a pretty good view up there. He kept hitting his feet against the wall while he talked. “I mean, we ain’t got anywhere to go, so we oughta relax a bit, maybe get some target practice in, you wanna do some later? I got that new pistol I wanted to try out on the BLU Soldier but I guess since he ain’t around that’ll have to wait.”

“Sure.” I threw him a thumbs-up just in case.

“Awesome, yeah that’s great, I think there’s gotta be something we could use for targets.” He jumped off the roof and yelled when I started climbing down, “Hey, come on, we don’t got all day.” I flipped him off and he kept going, “I think there’s some barrels by the intel room, let’s go check if they’re empty, you still got that paint?”

“No, I didn’t bring any. I thought I’d use my old flamethrower for this job before RED fucked it up.”

“Wait, was that a yes or no?”

“No.” I said it louder and shook my head hard to make sure.

“Gotcha. Next time you bring some we really should have some fun with it, maybe get Demo to fill a grenade with some – hey, maybe he’s got some empty bottles, that’d be way better than barrels, just shoot them all over the place.”

“Should we ask Sniper for some jars too?”

“I don’t know what you just asked, but, maybe? Would anyone get pissed?” When I could finally breathe again Scout was glaring at me so hard it was almost cute and I was this close to laughing again. “Fine, whatever, you coming or not you freakin’ lunatic?”

“I’m coming. Fuck, Scout, that was just – I couldn’t pay for something that good.”

Demo didn’t have a lot he could give us. “I told ye lads I only drink on the job, and this’s more a workin’ vacation. I’m not lettin’ good scrumpy go t’waste on target shootin’.” We finally found some cans in the kitchen nobody had gotten around to throwing out yet, but by then it was six o’clock and too fucking dark to do anything outside after dinner except wander around, and even then just where there was enough light from inside for me to see where I was going. I got back inside fast and didn’t bother opening my window. We were up high enough, and far enough away from everyone else on the planet, that even through my window and even when I’d been outside with my mask on I could see a fuckton of stars. I hadn’t gotten a lot of chances to see them when I was a kid, no way I could through the lights and smog, and no fucking way a kid like me got to go on a school camping trip. The first time I really got to see any was at Teufort, out in the middle of fucking nowhere with nothing around for miles, and even that wasn’t as many as there were at Granary. And both of those were shit for whenever we were in the mountains.

Back in the city – any city – there was always something going on, even if I was just wandering around drunk at three in the morning. Gas stations, garbage trucks, hospitals, late-night all-night fast food vans. It can get like that on a base, sort of. Driving up to the hills with the rest of the guys from the garage and plenty of cheap beer to look out over the city and know something’s going down out there but I’m not part of it – or maybe watch something burn and know that was something I did. I watched BLU’s side finally start going dark for the night, and I didn’t have to wait long for our lights to go out too.

If we got the fort to ourselves after a mission, we were free to wander around to check out the conference rooms with running projectors or try and open locked laboratory doors or go and see what was in BLU’s kitchen or spend a night looking at stars. But this time, if I wanted to, I could go over there first thing in the morning. Even if it was a SNAFU on RED’s part to get us here, I didn’t give a fuck. It felt really fucking good to be here, where I could go ahead and be myself, and not have to try to hide anything – nothing more than what I always did.

I kept looking over my shoulder when Scout and I set up the cans on a fence the next morning, in case this was RED’s idea of a huge practical joke and we’d get blasted with a rocket or backstabbed any minute. “Relax, you’re makin’ me nervous. What you got to worry about now, anyway? Working vacation, remember?”

“I know. I just need a couple of days to get used to the fucking idea, okay?” The last time we’d had any downtime during a mission was last March when we’d gotten shipped to Teufort again and that fucking director bitch interviewed everyone during a mutual cease-fire. I’d spent most of my session telling him I wasn’t breaking contract and where he could stick that camera. But as soon as he’d left, we went right back to what we were supposed to be doing. Now, we were here until November with fuck-all to do except get out of the way so Scout could practice with his new pistol until it started raining and we had to run inside.

Sniper gave my axe back after dinner, and he’d even sharpened it. “What’d you need it for, anyway?”

“Oh, no worries, just common courtesy.”

I nodded slowly. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”

It was still raining the next morning when I suited up to get breakfast, and when I asked Scout if he wanted to go outside. “Hell no. Maybe you didn’t notice but it’s freakin’ pourin’ out there, maybe if there was someone to shoot at but come on, no way you’re just gonna walk around when it’s like that.” The way he’d curled up it looked like he was trying to burrow into the couch, and I left him there and knocked on the window and waved when I got outside. He looked away and I went back to staring at the rain. It took me a while, and I had to keep a hand over my mouth to keep water from getting into my mask, but I forced myself to stop blinking whenever a big drop hit one of the lenses on the mask and just watched it all come down. I could feel it, sort of – I wasn’t running around chasing down the BLU Soldier or Scout, so I wasn’t getting warm enough to like getting cooled off. But it was okay. Kind of. It was goddamn weird to feel it hit my suit instead of me, and to hear it hit my mask and sound like it did last night when it hit the window.

When I realized I was shivering, I went inside to Engie’s workshop and watched him weld for a while, fuck me if I knew what he was working on and fuck me if I cared. I just wanted to watch him for a while and warm up. It’s always really warm in Engie’s workshop, and I didn’t even care when Spy came in and they started talking about his disguise kit, not until Spy gave me a weird look and said they could keep talking about it later. Yeah, fuck you too. He left, I stayed, Engie went back to welding, and I went to bed early. And it was still fucking raining, and I had to dig out my lighter to get everything quiet enough for me to sleep.

It’d stopped raining sometime overnight, so I followed Scout outside while he climbed on everything that’d support his weight and listened to him talk about whatever the hell he wanted to talk about. I’d left my oxygen tank in my room and that was about enough to let me keep up with him when he started jumping over the roofs. They were still pretty wet, and his sneakers made it harder for him to stay upright than my boots made it for me, but when he got his balance back after his first slip he grinned and yelled, “Aw, hell yeah!” and ran, jumped, and landed so he slid almost to the edge, then spun around on his heel and did it again. “Whooo! Top that! Man, this is better than – shit!”

He’d only broken his ankle, so he shot himself to finish the job. I sat at the edge and waited for him to get back from respawn. “Okay, I think I got it. Gonna try it again, you watch, stay right there.”

“Where the fuck would I go?”

“Whooo-haaa!” He ran and slid back and forth a few times, and it only took him two more trips to respawn before he figured out how to add jumping onto other roofs into the mix. “Oh man, ice skating’s for wimps, the ring is always packed and there’s never space to really get goin’ and move, what’s the freakin’ point if you can’t whoa! Okay, I’m good, thanks,” I grabbed his arm and helped pull him back up. “Yeah, I’m good. Hey, speakin’ of ice skating, you wanna see if the kitchen’s got any hot chocolate? That was always the best part of – oh. Right. Sorry. Um, maybe you can drink it in your room? Would that work?”

“You mean the little packets of that powdered shit?”

“Great, let’s go check.”

There wasn’t any in our half of the base, but we found a little jar of the stuff in the BLU kitchen, and Engie was even more excited than Scout. “No, you add it with the sugar, then the milk. Tastes just like coffee ice cream.”

“Engineer, under no circumstances will you feed him coffee,” Medic called from the dining table.

“Sheesh, I wasn’t plannin’ on it anyway,” Scout grumbled. “’Sides, the stuff you makes is freakin’ nasty, Snipes makes better coffee than you do.”

I went to watch Heavy and Medic finish another round of speed chess while Scout boiled the water – it wasn’t interesting, but there was always something happening, and they let me play with the pieces that weren’t on the board before they needed them for the next game. It got more fun when I had more than one of the horse pieces, but I had to give them all back after maybe twenty minutes. By then, the cocoa was cool enough for me to drink back in my room, but there was no fucking way I could finish it. The stuff tasted too much like the shit they had at all the hospitals, mass-produced chocolate-flavored crap so kids under eighteen could have something hot to drink. It wasn’t Scout’s fault RED shopped at the same places, but I sure as shit wasn’t telling him that, so I poured the rest of it down the toilet so he wouldn’t know. There was no fucking way I was running around after that, so after I made sure there wasn’t anything good on TV or the radio I went back to watching Heavy and Medic. Demo joined me after the third game. He’d made tea for them, too.

When Spy got back with the plants he’d gotten from walking around in the forest, I wanted to ask him how the hell he knew what to look for out in the middle of nowhere, but there was no goddamn way he’d know what I was asking, so I went back to playing with the horses. Knights, that’s what they were. I’d learned by then if I wanted to ask someone something, unless it was if they wanted to play catch or some shit I could fucking mime, I’d better hurry up and wait for someone else to do it for me and hope I was in earshot when they did.

But Spy was fucking Spy, so even if someone asked I knew he’d just smile and maybe flick his cigarette if he had one, and say he couldn’t afford to give away his secrets or some crap like that.

I did find out what Sniper needed my axe for a couple of days after that. I’d gotten up early and went to get Scout, and on our way to the kitchen he stopped and asked, “Do you smell something?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

“No, I definitely smell somethin’, I think it’s comin’ from the infirmary.” He pushed open the door to check, and Sniper turned around and took a break from rooting around inside a deer to look at us. He didn’t have a shirt on, was still wearing his hat and sunglasses, and there was enough blood on his hands to make it look like he was wearing gloves.

“Oh, g’day.” He picked up a knife and went right back to butchering.

Scout moved around me to get a better look. “What the fuck? Is that a – that’s a deer, right?”

“That it is, mate.” He had it on its side on a gurney, cut open from chin to ass, and there was another gurney covered with bowls from the kitchen. Some of them were empty and some had stuff in them, and Sniper pushed the deer up a little to get a better angle to pull something out – whatever the organ was, it was about the size of a grenade and really brown, and he dropped it in one of the empty bowls with a weird wet sound. Going by Scout’s face, that just made the room smell worse, but if Sniper noticed, he wasn’t giving a shit. I couldn’t smell anything, and going from all the blood on Sniper’s hands that was probably a good thing.

“Why the fuck do you have a deer?”

He shrugged and flipped it onto its other side, then spun the gurney around. “I needed it f’r a bow.”

“Huh?”

“The sinew.” He pointed at the hind legs with the knife, then went back to rooting around. “I’m makin’ a bow, and needed the sinew for the string.”

“Where’d you even get a freakin’ deer?”

“Out in the woods. Say, think y’could get Medic? I’ll be needin’ his bonesaw soon enough.”

Scout took off like he was glad Sniper gave him the excuse. I went a little closer to get a better look – I’d seen dead deer before, but those were all old roadkill, and this one was fresh and up close. The fucker was bigger than me, with one round bullet hole going right through the head right under a pair of antlers. Its tongue was hanging out of its mouth, and I thought that’d only happened in shitty cartoons. I tugged on its ears and giggled – they looked really soft even though I couldn’t tell if they were or not.

“Careful wi’those.” I pulled my hand back to my chest. “If y’want ’em, I could skin ’em for ya.”

“Oh shit, uh, no, that’s nice, but no. Thanks.”

“D’you want any of it?” He gestured over the body with the knife and a drop of blood hit him on the chest. “Truckie’s got first call on the meat, an’ I’ve got the heart, but mosta th’rest is up f’r grabs.” I shook my head. “Y’sure?”

“I can’t even boil rice, no way I’d know what to do with a fucking liver.”

“Suit yourself.” He’d started cutting the skin away from the muscles, and I left to get breakfast. It was oatmeal again, boring as shit but what-the-fuck ever, and when I went back to wash my bowl everyone was arguing over what parts of the deer they wanted, with Engie writing everything down. I pulled up a chair and rested my chin on my hands.

“It’s the sauce that matters, you give me twenty minutes in the kitchen and I promise you I’ll bring forth a concoction that will –”

“The sauce ain’t worth a thing if the meat’s no good, and this meat’s too good to put any sauce to. ’Sides, he said I got first call, so if I want the ribs, tough luck.”

“I’ll fight you for them.”

“No, thank you.”

“Does anyone else want tongue?”

“Nein, Heavy, that you may have to yourself. Spy, you wanted the liver as well? Demo?”

“Hey, Hardhat, how come you got first crack at it?”

“We used my truck to get it back here, is why.”

“Nah, jes’ some of the nicer cuts, there isn’t the stuff ’round here to cook anythin’ fancy properly.”

“Arm wrestling!”

“Nope.”

“I am forced to agree with you, but I remain faithful that even in these circumstances I can prepare a very few things as they are meant to be eaten.”

“Jeez, just gimme a decent hunk of meat, I don’t know how you guys can even think about eatin’ something’s guts. It’s just freakin’ disgusting, is what it is.”

“Now, Scout, the organs are far more nutritious than the muscles.”

“Whatever, you guys fight over ’em all you want, I’m not gonna be eatin’ any.”

“No wonder Scout is so tiny. Your mother never roasted marrow bones?”

“She’d throw ’em in a soup maybe but you’d just eat ’em? Oh, man, is that gross.”

“Personal squeamishness is no reason to waste good resources and your forefathers would be ashamed to hear of it. Learn to muscle past your gag reflex and eat like a man.”

“If you had even the faintest idea of what goes into your so-called American meat, you would not be so smug, I promise you.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, fine. Look, I didn’t grow up eatin’ weird stuff, okay? Just plain meat. It’s more guts for you guys, why are you complainin’ ’bout me not eatin’ any?”

“There’s not a good reason to not eat ’em, lad, not unless ye want t’be stubborn about it.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I do!”

“Meat from a wild deer, all of it will be delicious. It will be only your loss to not have any.”

“I’m sorry, Scout, but I gotta go with everybody else on this one. Organ meat is really good stuff.”

They all turned to look at me, and I started mentally kicking myself.

“Are you on my side here or what?” I shook my head. “Yeah, I thought so, everyone against me, and lemme tell ya there ain’t no way –”

“Fuck, Scout, just shut up and try some fucking liver when someone cooks it up, all right? Fuck, you don’t want us to treat you like a little kid but you make it too fucking easy most days, and you fuckers have no fucking idea what the fuck I’m saying.”

“Pardonnez-moi?”

“Fuck off!” I grinned and threw everyone a double thumbs-up.

“I suppose for the shambling monstrosity and myself to be in agreement against you is a reasonable way for us to find some common ground.”

I slouched back in my chair, crossed my arms over my chest, and went back to listening and kicking myself. Every fucking time – okay, pretty much everyone can figure out what I’m yelling about on the field from what’s going on, and Scout and Engie get it right about half the time, but otherwise opening my mouth is a huge crapshoot. Fuck, the looks everyone gives me when I forget that.

Heavy and Demo started going on about how good eggs are when they’re from chickens they know. I wanted to talk to them about my grandparents killing their own chickens and cooking them a couple of hours later for the best goddamn chicken I’ve ever eaten, just to get Spy to shut up when he joined in, but I’d already gotten my lesson for the day.

I loved my job, I loved missions, I loved who I was on the team, and when I couldn’t do any of what I’d been fucking hired to do – it wasn’t like waiting in New York when I knew something was coming if I waited. There were another two weeks until we got shipped out to where I didn’t have to give a fuck about anyone else. The fucking thing was I did give a fuck about my team. I gave a shitload of fucks. But Jesus fucking Christ, there were some fucking days.

“You’re sure you don’t want anything?” Engie asked me.

My grandparents had rabbits, too, and if they killed one when I was there I’d get the tail to play with, and a deer’s tail wasn’t that different from a rabbit’s, and I could clean it off, play with it, maybe use it to tease Scout.

I shook my head.

“I think that’s all, then.”

10.

Most of the deer was hanging in the respawn room to age, but the fridge and freezer were full of labeled containers so I had to shove aside liver and hooves to get some of last night’s dinner for breakfast. When I was done eating and went to look for Engie, I found him in his workshop along with Medic and Demo. They were all poking at Medic’s medigun and talking about currents and wires and loadouts and shit, so I went to find Scout.

Maybe twenty minutes after I found him I stomped off. I was usually fine when he talked at me instead of to me, but after what went down yesterday being around the little fucker was hitting the wrong nerves. I needed something to do, or someone to sit near, hell, a warm body would be super – there were plenty of days back in LA I’d deliberately made some bad decisions so I wouldn’t be alone that night, but fuck it, this wasn’t LA and I wasn’t that kid anymore.

I found Sniper on a folding lawn chair hammering out arrowheads by his van. He looked up when I leaned against the bumper, went back to what he was doing, then looked back up at me when I didn’t move or say anything. Then he put his stuff down, went inside, and came out a couple of minutes later with another chair and a book. He shoved the book at my chest, some stories by some guy named August Van Zorn, and after I’d grabbed it he’d set up the chair and went back to his arrowheads.

“Thanks.”

He didn’t look up at me, just grunted. “You’re always watchin’ that Star Trek and Twilight Zone on the telly, figured you’d like some ghost stories. Keep it, I’ve read it already.”

I almost asked him where he’d gotten it, but sat down and started reading instead. It was the same pulp stuff everyone wrote back in the 30s and 40s, Indian burial grounds and evil immigrants and inhuman monsters, and it took me a while to get into the writing style, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t read before, even if it’d been ages since I’d picked up a pulp magazine on break at the garage. After a few pages, I felt a little better. At least Sniper didn’t expect me to say anything.

All the good I felt went up shit creek when I saw Spy coming. I didn’t stick around and left to read somewhere else, but he still grinned and stopped to ask me, “And how are you this afternoon?” I just flipped him off.

Two nights later I went outside after it got dark. The moon finally got full, and there wasn’t a whole lot of a difference between the night before and the night of, except Demo got into a little argument with Engineer about superstitions, and Soldier went on one of his long stories about killing his way across Poland with only the night sky as his guide. I figured every little bit of extra light was something I could use.

We were up high enough in the mountains that the moon plus the lights from the base meant I didn’t have any trouble seeing where I was going. Not that I was going anywhere – I just wanted to get out for a while to see what it was like being outside when I didn’t have to kill anyone or worry about a knife to the back.

Everyone else was asleep early or busy with something, and the BLU half of the base was dark except for the few hallway that never got dark and the security lamps that had a timer that’d kicked in two hours ago. Right in between them, and close to the edge of the base where the treeline started, there wasn’t much coming from either side and the moon was bright enough I didn’t have any trouble seeing anything. I couldn’t tell if I liked it or not. It was easy to see everything, sure, and it felt good to be alone by myself for a while without having to lock my door, but there wasn’t any color in anything, and I couldn’t take off my mask when I was outside. Branches up high were shaking a bit, and it was quiet enough that I could hear some of them. I rubbed my hands together through my gloves and crossed my arms over my chest, then took another deep breath and looked up at the stars. As far as I could tell it was a really nice night out.

I went back inside, locked my door and stripped off everything to sit naked on the bed. It might’ve been warm for October but my room felt fucking freezing right after my suit, and I didn’t bother putting anything on. I didn’t turn on my lighter, just rubbed it between my hands. Knowing it was there and remembering what was inside it – it was almost enough. Flicking it on and running my fingers through the flame was almost enough.

Then I remembered where I was, and how I could get enough, and I knew I was an idiot for not thinking of it sooner.

I almost asked Heavy for help the next morning before I started, but figured that he wouldn’t understand what I’d be asking for and it’d be better to do it myself anyway. And Medic would give me shit for days if I woke them up at this hour – even Engineer wasn’t awake yet. There were plenty of trees small enough that I could drag them myself, and it wasn’t like I wouldn’t be chopping them into smaller pieces. It couldn’t be that hard to chop down a tree, and if I did it close enough to our base and something went wrong I’d just get milled through respawn.

I found a good one out in the open near the BLU half of the base and got to work. After a few minutes I had to stop to get my goddamn oxygen tank, because there was no way I could keep going without it. I tried going by what I’d seen people do on TV – get a little wedge on one side and a bigger one on the other – and it didn’t take me long to make either one. I’d never used my axe on a tree before, but chopping down someone who’s fighting back and running away is really good training for something that’s not going anywhere. I gripped the axe tighter and let it swing, felt everything come up through my arms and down my back, pulled the axe out, braced my legs and kept on swinging.

Scout ran up when I was about halfway through the trunk. “Hey, I been lookin’ for you all morning, is this what you’re busy with, aw seriously, why. We got plenty of wood already cut up if you need any, just lying around all over, what’s with this?”

“Because if I don’t find something to do, I’m gonna go fucking crazy.”

He scrunched up his face the way he always did when he didn’t know what the fuck I’d said. I stopped chopping and stared at him.

“That all you gotta say?”

I closed my eyes and took deep breaths until I heard him run off and I could get back to the tree. I kept smiling when I watched it go down, and felt it in my fucking teeth when it hit the ground with this huge sound like a really good explosion. A few birds started crying out, just like in the movies.

I started splitting it into pieces I could carry that’d also burn better. Big pieces of wood could burn, but they wouldn’t catch as good as smaller ones, or stay in control as easy. I’d need kindling and dry bits to give it a good base, too, leaves and twigs and shit since, fucking pinecones, there wasn’t any newspaper up here. I had plenty of propane to help it get going and move along so I wasn’t worried about that, but making sure it stayed where I wanted it to meant I needed smaller pieces. This wasn’t blowing up a fucking car, this was a goddamn bonfire. It wasn’t like I hadn’t made them before and knew what not to do – messing up a bonfire isn’t something that happens to someone more than once.

Some sap started leaking out, and the way it stayed on my gloves after I rubbed them on the grass I didn’t want to think about what I’d need to do to clean it off my axe. Maybe boiling water would do it. I sighed and went back to chopping – I’d gotten a good stroke in, swinging with my back and letting my arms come along for the ride, and didn’t want to stop until I ran out of tree. When I did, it wasn’t neatly laid out or in regular pieces all the same size, but that didn’t fucking matter since it was small enough to work with and I could leave them to dry out a little overnight.

After breakfast, I started clearing a spot near the train tracks behind the dorms with my flamethrower, laying down little fires and airblasting or stomping them out as soon as they’d done their job. About halfway through it, Soldier came over to watch with the deer’s antlers strapped to his helmet – and fuck me, his shovel would’ve been perfect, but nobody touched it but him – so I waved at him and went back to making the clearing a little bigger.

“And just what in the name of Sam Hill do you think you’re doing, private? Standing around idle? Hah! You’re a shame and disgrace to our unit, we’re only as strong as our weakest links, and that won’t be me if I have a say! I haven’t wasted a single day to even an hour of laziness and here you are prancing around fooling about with your toys without even the dignity to play-act a battle like a wolf training his cubs!”

Staring at him didn’t work like it did with Scout – he just kept yelling – so I started to ignore him and let the fires burn a bit longer than they really needed to until he got bored and wandered off. I finished clearing the space and started moving the tree over, one piece at a time. Setting up the base was easy since there was stuff for tinder all over the place and there were enough rocks from the waterfall to make a decent ring.

Everything got drizzled with propane, and I gave in and got a few boards from the shed like Scout said, the little fucker. They were taller than any of the sticks and branches I’d found, and the ones in the shed were dryer too, and it wasn’t like RED was going to use them anyway, so why the fuck not grab four or five to give it a little more shape and a little more to eat. By the time I’d propped up all of them in the ring around the tinder and the logs there was less than an hour until it got dark.

“Fucking bring it,” I muttered.

I took out my Zippo, flicked it on and watched it breathe, lit the end of a long branch and thrust that into the middle of the pile and jumped back when everything came alive. The fire roared like a fucking lion, bursting out, flying out, flying up and growing and I couldn’t stop laughing I was so fucking happy to see it. It was big enough for me to feel it through my fucking mask, hot and good and clean, and I could hear it perfectly. Fire crawled down the wood and wrapped around the boards and tried to reach out into the air to grab it, but there wasn’t anything for it to touch so it curled back in on itself, reaching up higher and higher. Everything burned a different color and all the colors and flames melted into each other, swinging and dancing in perfect grace like they always did every time. I moved a little closer to see it better, the tiny ragged edges and the smooth round bright insides, the guts of it brighter than the rest and the edges curving inside and around and opening up again.

I couldn’t get closer than the edge of the ring, but it looked so perfect, it’d been so long since I’d seen a fire this big – it looked like it did when I was a little kid and didn’t know better, didn’t know fire, it looked like it did when I was six and just wanted to pick it up and hold it in my hands. I reached out without thinking about it, then pulled my hands back right away and clenched them into fists and held them close against my chest, and tried to stop shaking and just watch.

The fire didn’t care. It kept on roaring and reaching up for the sky, and I kept on watching.

It wasn’t until Scout said something that I noticed everyone else had joined me. I didn’t hear what he’d said, just that he’d said something, and I looked over at him staring at the bonfire, arms hanging down and eyes wide open. Everyone was watching it leap up at the night sky – no wonder I was so hungry. I looked back at Scout and he was still going. I had better things to do than give a fuck, so I stopped paying attention to him and went back to staring at the fire.

Nobody else said anything, and after a while they all started to leave until it was just me again, with the bonfire going without stopping for anything. I stayed a while longer until I couldn’t ignore that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and had to go inside. As soon as I sat down with my food, the last two days hit me like a fucking freight train and I knew I couldn’t go back outside to watch it some more. Fuck showering, I didn’t even bother washing my dishes or brushing my teeth, just finished eating, got out of my suit, and fell onto the bed.

I slept so goddamn good that night, and I woke up feeling better rested and just fucking better than I had since the last mission. There was still a week to go before we got shipped out and the fort’s regular crew got swapped back in, and I didn’t mind waiting. I just suited up to get ready for the day.

The bonfire had burned itself out overnight. There was just the skeleton left, the last bits that hadn’t managed to burn into ash, and the whole thing looked so sad and tired I couldn’t even think about kicking it down. I figured I’d let the wind take care of that, and crouched down to pick up some of the ashes and let them fall through my fingers. I couldn’t smell anything through my mask, but I’d lit enough bonfires that I didn’t need to take it off to know what the ashes in my hands smelled like or take off my gloves to know what they felt like.

When I’d set the hills on fire back in California they’d sometimes burn for days, and after everything was over, I’d go back and see what’d happened and find out what I’d done. The papers and news shows always talked about the property damages and the people who’d died, and I knew those mattered, but I didn’t want to hear about those as much as I wanted to see what’d happened. I’d watch the fires when they were going for as long as I could, and that was some of it; I had to come and see what happened when they were over. I wanted to see where the fire had come through and what it’d taken. I wanted to smell the old smoke in the air and listen to the wind shake everything apart and run my fingers through ash and watch everything blow away and know what I’d done.

I almost took the ring apart and threw the rocks back by the waterfall, but with winter almost here, whoever was coming in next would know exactly what to do with it. So I went looking for Scout to find something else to do.

He was out by the respawn area with Demo, who was hacking away at a dummy he’d rigged up from the rafters.

“ – so they ask me again, and I can’t tell them I can’t tell them again ’cause they’ll just keep askin’ anyway, so I gotta remember the right, what’s that word for something you use when you can’t say what you want, euphemisms, the right euphemisms they told us way back when, so I just say ‘special forces’ but my fourth-oldest brother’s fiancée’s brother’s in that for real so she starts asking, oh hey Pyro.”

“G’morning.”

I gave them a little wave.

“How you doin’ today?”

“Pretty fucking good,” I said.

“Great, me too. Yeah, anyway,” he turned right back to Demo, “so I finally get everyone to stop when I start on about the time Medic and Heavy got the BLU Spy and they ripped him apart and got his guts falling out and they called me over to show me where kidneys are. Anyway, then we’re all talkin’ about the weather.”

Demo chuckled and spun around with some sort of war cry to slice off one of the dummy’s arms. “Oh, ye wouldn’t believe how glad I am most o’the family’s in the same business – they didn’t like me and mum movin’ to America, but times’re gettin’ tight back home and they understand that well enough, movin’ to where the work is.”

“So what exactly do you say to them when they ask?”

“It depends on who’s askin’ and what they’re askin’ for.”

That would’ve been about the time Scout would’ve asked me if I had anyone asking me anything about what I did for a living if he hadn’t kept talking to Demo about all his cousins. I’d have said no anyway. But he kept talking to Demo like I wasn’t fucking there, and the one time I tried to say anything they looked at me and then went back to talking to each other, except they did it a little more quietly.

If it made them happy to talk about being from big families, I’d be fucking happy to leave them to it. I went to watch Heavy and Medic play chess, and they let me play with the captured pieces like they always did, only they talked a little more quietly when they talked at all.

It was like that with everyone. It would’ve made me think they were all treating me like a little kid staying up late if I didn’t know any better. Like I couldn’t see the looks they gave each other or how they scooted away when I sat down or how they were more careful with what they said to me when they finally fucking talked to me.

I knew how to deal with the faces they made – what-the-hell-is-that, I’m-not-messing-with-the-crazy, what-happened-to-the-freak – when they came from people off the street, people I didn’t fucking know. When Engineer threw one at me when I went into his workshop to hang out with him two nights before we were finally going to ship out, he hid the I’m-not-messing-with-the-crazy face right away, just before he smiled and said hello, but I fucking saw it even with his goddamn goggles. I didn’t storm out because I knew if I did I’d just prove him right, and went and sat on one of the benches and watched him clean his guns until I gave up and closed my eyes and dozed until I heard him start cleaning up and I knew I could leave.

I stayed in the shower room for almost an hour, breathing in as much steam as I could to clear out my lungs. If anyone needed to piss, well, they could go outside and do it in the fucking bushes. It wasn’t like we didn’t do worse in the middle of a fight when we couldn’t run back to base. Hell, I’d seen Scout send himself to respawn instead of taking a shower to clean himself off at least twice.

It wasn’t like anyone on the team was the model of fucking perfection when it came to being all there, like my parents used to say when they thought I couldn’t fucking hear them. Maybe not all of us had killed anyone for keeps before joining RED, but there was no fucking way anyone could take a job like this and keep going without being a little crazy. And maybe they weren’t crazy like I knew I was – I could look in a fucking textbook to read what I had – but we were all missing something. Marbles, cards, screws, what-the-fuck-ever. We did our fucking best to stay on top of it and keep on going. I spent every fucking day on that. I knew that Medic worked his ass off to stay as stable as he did on his better days and that there was no fucking way Soldier functioned as well as he did without some serious strategies. I knew everyone else knew it, and I couldn’t figure out why the fuck they didn’t know that about me too.

I took another deep breath and let the steam hit the back of my throat, and that set off a coughing fit. I felt better at the end of it than I had before it’d started, and finally toweled off and suited up to walk down the hall to my room and lock the door. I finished Sniper’s book buck naked on top of the covers while I ran my hands up and down my arms and legs to feel scar on scar or scar on clear skin, depending on where they were.

“Nah, keep it, like I said, I read it already, don’t need to keep lugging it around. You want another?” He didn’t look up from the arrows he was making, but that meant he wasn’t shooting me any looking-at-you-makes-me-uncomfortable looks, so that was fucking fine with me.

“Sure.”

That got him to stop what he was doing and look at me after a moment with the best wait-a-fucking-minute face I’d ever seen him make. “That’s a yes, right?”

“Sure,” I repeated, and nodded hard to make sure he’d gotten it.

The one he gave me was by some guy named Leon Chaim Bach who wrote books instead of short stories, big fat things on utterly boring shit that was somehow interesting, mostly because even reading about someone figuring out how to set up an anniversary party for her parents was better than staring out the window at the Midwest for ten hours. But I finished it when I was back in Brooklyn and had better stuff to do, like visit the big library in Manhattan and look at the murals on the third floor ceiling, because by then I wanted to know how it’d end.

I left both books on the kitchen table until I got tired of looking at them, and took them out to the barbeque on the roof and watched them burn.

11.

It took three months and five missions for everyone to look at me like normal. The bitch of it was things had always been normal, they’d never stopped being normal, and it was up to me to remind everyone that we had to get back to fucking normal.

Okay, maybe not normal, since life on the team never got calm enough to get to anything we could call normal. But regular, typical, average, shit like that. We were a goddamn team, and things wouldn’t work if everyone else didn’t remember that – and if I had to remind them by pulling their asses out of trouble every goddamn day, I was fucking fine with that. Our first mission after Sawmill was back down in Gravel Pit and I’d thought, fine, they think I’m crazy, I’ll run out there with a goddamn rubber glove on my head, but it didn’t take long before I knew fuck me, I’d had enough of acting batshit crazy because everyone thought I was. I was done with that shit.

We had a little time to ourselves up in Viaduct in January after we secured the point before BLU had a chance, and I spent most of that helping Engie fix and upgrade the stove and some of it watching Heavy and Scout play in the snow until Scout yelled at me to join in. After that we got sent over to Junction, then Offblast – and by March they weren’t giving me the looks my parents gave me, and by April things were pretty much back to where they should’ve stayed.

I’d gotten a lot of mileage out of my homewrecker – that thing was a fucking blessing when I knew Sniper was watching me taking out a BLU teleporter or when I’d listen Engie go on how I’d saved his ass by knocking sappers off his sentries when he was halfway across the base setting up a teleporter. It let everyone to see me doing my fucking job, and got them to look at me like their goddamn teammate again.

I was happy enough that I figured I’d get a new bed. I’d wanted one for a while, but never got around to it because I didn’t think I spent that much time in New York and the one I had worked fine. But it wasn’t any better than one at a base, even Junction, and fuck it, I wanted something nice to sleep on when I didn’t have to go for industrial-grade shit-for-standards. I’d gotten my bed as a package deal with the mattress so I’d been able to move into my place as soon as I could.

When I picked out the new mattress and bed, I went ahead and paid for next-day delivery. I’d been in New York for four days and RED could call me next week or next month and I wouldn’t know until I’d get a call telling me to come to one of their offices for a briefing, so why the fuck not go for it. The guys could’ve passed for some of Heavy’s cousins, and they got the new bed set up and my old one out in just a couple of hours. Most of that was getting the stuff up and down the fucking stairs, and I gave them all huge tips for dealing with a walk-up and because I could. When they were done and I’d put on the sheets and blankets, I turned around and fell backwards onto it. I rolled over and over and still had space left for another little roll, and then did it the other way.

It made it feel less weird to have something new. It wasn’t like I didn’t spend money, I bought stuff all the time – soap, pizza, museum passes, movie tickets, Mexican take-out – but I didn’t buy things too much. It’d been months since I’d gotten any new weapons and before the bed, the last things I’d gotten were a six-pack of boxers because the waistband on some of my old ones were slipping down and there’s no fucking way I’m going to stop chopping someone to death just to readjust my underwear. Buying something new always took me a while to get used to having it around.

Three days later on the train, I’d thought at least I’d have something to look forward to when the mission was over. When I got back to Brooklyn from Badlands two-and-a-half weeks later, it was with my fucking tail tucked between my legs and I couldn’t give a fuck about the bed. We hadn’t gotten our shit together long enough or fast enough for a goddamn two-point cap, and the next mission was just the same, like we’d never fought at Watchtower before. The best way I knew to get an advantage was pull out something they’d never seen before and couldn’t be prepared for. Sometimes that meant a flowery tea hat or gluing a fake beard to my mask to confuse the shit out of everyone, and sometimes that meant a new weapon. And right now, a new weapon meant making a new flamethrower, and that meant getting off my ass and figuring out what the hell that was supposed to be.

I wanted something lighter and easier to run with, and that’d mean it wouldn’t burn so hot for as long, but I could make that trade. I’d really play around with the design to get that going, though, and it took me most of a day wandering around Brooklyn to find something I thought might work. When I did, it was over in Williamsburg at a store that reminded me of my grandfather’s old garage down to the grease I could smell through the scarf. I had to buy the whole fucking stove right there and pay one of the guys to take off the burners because I sure as fuck didn’t have the stuff to take apart a stove in my apartment. I got most of the rest of what I’d work with at one of the better junkyards, then decided to go for it and got a new fire extinguisher.

I wasn’t painting anything this time, so I didn’t have to put off going to sleep the first night out in Dustbowl. I just had to work on it for three nights straight instead of watching Scout watch baseball games or play cards with Soldier and Demo, but it was so fucking worth it when I was done and got to show it off to Engie first, basically begging him to put down his guitar and notes and take a look. When he finally did, he didn’t say anything at first, just looked at it real carefully all over, turning it around to look at the welding and pulled off his glove to run his metal fingers down its side. I like machines fine, but Engie just fucking loved machines.

“That’s a pretty clever contraption – not what I’d make myself, but I figure you know your way around offensive combustion engines.” He chuckled, and when I got what he said I laughed a bit and threw him thumbs-up, and he handed it back with a sigh. “I know, I keep sayin’ I’ll take a few days to make something new myself.”

“You made your hand,” I said, and pointed to it in case he hadn’t hear me right.

“Oh, this?” He flexed his fingers and pulled the glove back on. “Yeah, I suppose, but it ain’t original work, is what I mean.”

“Fuck you. You’re busy because you’re keeping our asses safe out there and have to make sure all your shit’s together to keep that going, not because you’re fucking lazy. You do more work than pretty much anyone.” I patted and squeezed him on the shoulder.

He looked at my hand, sighed again, and smiled at me. “If that’s supposed to cheer me, I think it did the trick.”

I patted and squeezed his shoulder again, and threw him an A-Okay just in case.

There wasn’t any time that night to test it out, not if I wanted some fucking sleep, so I had to wait for the next day to see how well it worked, which turned out to be pretty damn good. We had to keep BLU from jacking into RED’s network, it had something to do with Yugoslavia and human traffic, and this time we weren’t going to play cap-the-point tag, we were going to hand them their fucking asses on a plate. When I ran out to see who I’d be killing first, it turned out to be their Demoman, who sent me through respawn five minutes after I sent him there, thanks to a couple of fucking stickies way up in the corners where I didn’t see them.

The next ten days were all pretty much like that, dashing around and ambushing and running away as soon as there was someone else I needed to take care of. There was one day Medic was busy with Demo so it was me and Heavy holding a point, and another where Soldier and me tried to break through BLU’s defense and he shot a rocket to me so I could airblast it right for me to jump up with him, and when we finally heard the bell ring at the end after BLU hadn’t jacked shit, I knew I’d helped get that to happen. Just by doing my fucking job the best I could.

It didn’t always go our way. Sometimes BLU got to a base early and chocked us off when we could’ve done some fucking good if we’d gotten more time to get to know the place, or they knew exactly what shit they had to grab to send us home early. And the less about the time Soldier pissed off that magician, the better – two weeks in fucking Medieval Scotland, and I’d never been as grateful for indoor plumbing as I was when he finally sent us back.

12.

We were eight days into our mission at Granary, trying to get all the cap-points under our control before BLU locked them down. It wasn’t supposed to be anything special, as close to a routine gig as we ever got, except BLU was doing its best to fuck that up. Just eight days in and they’d already started night fighting; when the sun had started setting, they’d kept on going instead of scattering, so we’d kept going with them. We weren’t on the offense like they were; we’d gotten three points right after each other in the last two days, and we couldn’t go forward without risking those.

It’d been an hour since Spy had fucking vanished into thin air right in front of my fucking face, and almost two since I’d seen Sniper swap his rifle for his bow. Engie was running all over the place to make sure everything was working and nobody was sapping anything, and I was stuck with my goddamn rake.

Don’t get me wrong, most times I loved it – hell, when Soldier had his shovel we pretty much had a goddamn garden party going – but a night like that my sledgehammer would’ve been better. And if I’d known I’d be doing night fighting three hours earlier, I’d have taken out the BLU Scout out first just to get some revenge ahead of time. The little fucker had managed to get past Heavy and all the sentries and was trying to cap our point, but one good shotgun blast and he dropped what he was doing, and another good shot got wasted when he dodged it and started shooting back. I didn’t get enough time to be surprised, just to move the fuck out of the way and fucking dance my way around him until he got close enough to shoot with my flamethrower – except the little shitbag knew what he was doing and didn’t get anywhere near enough for that to work. He just cackled and shouted, “I’m runnin’ circles around ya!” before taking another shot with his pistol.

I wasn’t going to get anything done with him running around like that – trading shots wasn’t getting either of us anywhere – and if he took me out the point was theirs and no fucking way was I letting that happen. So I ran towards him with my rake over my head and screamed, “Get the fuck outta my way!”

He shot me in the chest, but I got him good and clean with the rake and then managed to get my flamethrower out and on him before he could shoot me again. I woke up in respawn maybe twenty minutes later, but it gave me an excuse to run to my room and grab my sledgehammer.

By the time the sun came up nobody won or lost anything except a night’s sleep, and they were just as pissed about it as us. Maybe more – I think they wanted this to be over even more than we did, and they were rushing forward and trying to get us to pull back and cut our losses, like we had less riding on this than they did. But it’s the same with every mission: you win or you lose and you don’t get points for trying. BLU had come back from holding just one point to capping all five a couple of times before, balls-to-the-wall offense for days without stopping to breathe, and I wouldn’t admit to it but I could admire that. But I wasn’t going to fucking roll over and let it happen when they started it up again.

It was faster to get mowed down by the minigun and sent through respawn after charging the BLU Heavy and getting him burning so Demo could finish him off than to rush all the way across the base to grab my barb-wire axe. When I ran back outside the loudspeakers were shouting we’d gotten the fourth point and BLU had better watch its ass because we were going to finish this good and fast and bloody.

I took out the BLU Soldier before he took over the point nearest to our base, and wrapped myself around a friendly dispenser for a few minutes before I kept on going towards the last point we needed. I was about halfway there when I heard Spy scream and saw him running with his suit on fire. I almost wanted to let it go, but I knew it wouldn’t help anyone if I was that goddamn petty, so I ran over to him and airblasted it out. And of course he didn’t take the time to do anything but brush himself off and say, “My appreciations,” and cloak and run off again.

Then I turned around and there was the BLU Pyro. Fuck.

It sounded like they cheered when they started up their flamethrower and I tried to run backwards without falling over or dropping my flamethrower. It wouldn’t do too much unless – shit, unless they airblasted me across the room to land on my ass while they laughed and pulled out their shotgun. The best thing I could do was roll and dodge and try to get my feet under me to get out of the way before they got the chance to get a good shot in. I got my flamethrower out and they kept laughing as I ran towards them – it was their turn to dodge when I took a shot at them, and whatever they shouted I didn’t understand so I just yelled back, “Yeah, same to you!”

They pulled their flamethrower out again but didn’t airblast, just let it breathe good and hard and got me in the flames, and it didn’t do a lot right away but it would if I didn’t do something soon, and I kept running back and they kept coming. I wasn’t close enough for my axe but I was about at the right distance for my own shotgun, and the only reason I got them first is because I was a little faster at shooting them than they were at me. I got them in the leg and stomach, two good shots to get them down, and that got me out of ammo but that was fine since that was enough to take what was left of them out with my axe.

I reloaded my shotgun before I kept on running towards the point. The whole day was bloody fucking skirmishes and little fights: BLU was losing but that made it easier on their side, I’d been there before and it wasn’t fun but all they had to do was push back. We had to push forward and keep gaining without losing anything, and we lost our third point and gained it back twenty minutes later – the points at Granary couldn’t get locked to them or us unless someone had all five, which was just a fucking shame since it would’ve made life so much easier.

It was almost midnight when our big push started, balls-to-the-wall fucking offense paying off for us this time with BLU doing its fucking best to hold their one point and keep us off it. All we needed was five minutes, not even, we just needed someone on there long enough to lock it down but we couldn’t even get in pissing distance of the damn thing.

Their Sniper almost took me out a couple of times when I was busy with their Demo until ours managed to get his attention and got me the opening I needed. Thank fuck Medic was right there, and I threw him a thumbs-up before running to find someone else.

The loudspeaker shouted something I didn’t hear because the BLU Engineer was right around the corner setting up a teleporter and didn’t know I was coming for him, oh this was too fucking good. I got closer, going as slowly as I could manage, ready to pounce, and then he turned around and his goggles looked even shinier than Engie’s with nighttime all around. He smiled, pulled out his pistol, and fucking whispered, “Well, good evening.”

“I wouldn’t fucking say so.”

“Better speak up, boy, if you got somethin’ to say.” I let my flamethrower rip at the same time he shot and hit me, hit me twice, and it was nothing I couldn’t ignore for a few more moments because just then Scout ran up out of fucking nowhere and whacked him good upside the head with his baseball bat. He knew enough to get out of the way when I let my flamethrower go again, a beautiful light in the dark, taking the fucker down just as the loudspeaker shouted we’d gotten the last and final point.

“Aww yeah!”

I was about to join him when my leg went out under me. I didn’t really feel it, it just stopped working all of a sudden.

“You okay, man?”

“Fuck.” I wiggled my finger into the hole in my suit and brought it out all bloody, and then saw the other shot was in my fucking stomach, and when I saw them that’s when they started to hurt like a fucking motherfucker. I tried moving and that just made it worse, and I fell to my hands and knees. Fuck.

“Okay, you listenin’ to me, you just stay here I’ll get Medic we’re fine we won, you hear me we won we’re gonna be fine, just stay there, Medic come on man!” He took off running before I could grab his pistol and left me with the BLU Engineer’s corpse burning, and it was so good to watch but I hadn’t gotten close enough – his shots hadn’t gotten me clean, and all I could do was wait to bleed out enough to hit organ failure. I fell onto my stomach and rolled onto my side to wait it out. I didn’t know how to make it go any fucking faster, and I was too weak to get his pistol to do myself in quick. I could feel blood filling the inside of my suit, clenched my toes and felt it in my sock, and all I could think when I felt Heavy pick me up was that it’d be a bitch to clean even if respawn took care of most of it.

I wanted to ask them to shoot me and do it fast, right between the eyes, but I couldn’t do more than shake my head – I felt lightheaded enough I knew it was blood loss hitting me hard, not me dying, fuck why was it taking so long – and then I suddenly felt warm, and before I could do anything, I closed my eyes and let the world fade out.

13.

I woke up in the infirmary. The sun was shining through the blinds, the air was warm and the sheets on the bed were cool, and the radio was playing a man singing soft and quiet. I blinked a couple of times and sighed. I closed my eyes, licked my lips, then opened them again.

I wasn’t wearing my mask.

Holy fuck.

I wasn’t in my suit. I wasn’t wearing my mask, and I wasn’t in my suit. Holy mother of fuck, where the fuck was my suit. Why the fuck wasn’t I in my room, why the fuck didn’t I wake up in respawn, what the fuck.

I propped myself up on my elbows and groaned. “Anybody gonna tell me what’s going on?”

“Ah, you’re awake.” Medic turned off the radio, and I watched him come over and look down at me. I’d never seen him without my mask on and couldn’t stop staring at his face, at the little wrinkles around his eyes and the pale stubble on his cheeks, stuff I hadn’t been able to see through my mask. I swallowed hard and started breathing fast. “And how are you feeling?” This close I could smell his breath, that old-coffee smell everyone gets after their first cup in the morning.

I took a deep breath and tried to keep my voice from shaking. “What am I doing here?”

“Recovering, and quite nicely at that.”

“From getting shot.”

“Well, the bullets didn’t pass through your body, so after I healed you, I had to perform surgery to extract them. And you were still unconscious, so –”

“Why didn’t you just shoot me?”

He blinked a couple of times. “I am not in the habit of letting people use respawn when there’s no need for me to do so.”

“You could’ve just shot me and saved yourself the trouble.”

This close I could see his jaw clench. “You were still unconscious, so we left you here to sleep.”

“And you didn’t take me to my room because, why?”

“We left you in the infirmary because even with the help of the medigun, moving a patient after surgery is far from a good idea.”

“So everybody saw.”

He didn’t say anything.

“So you healed me and opened me up and took off my suit and didn’t even put me in my fucking room when you were done because, why, because it’d be easier for you?”

“I did nothing last night that was simply easier. If I had done so, I would have left you to bleed to death.”

“So you didn’t do any of it just because you wanted to know what was in my suit.”

He didn’t say anything. “Nothing I did was simply because it was convenient.”

“Fuck off.” I rolled onto my side.

“I’ll leave you for a while.” His boots clicked on the floor, louder than I’d ever heard them, and before he left I called out to him.

“Medic?”

“Yes?”

“You’re a cunt.”

“I’m – excuse me?”

I shut my eyes. “Go ask Engineer.”

The door swung shut behind him and I heard it click, and didn’t move until I couldn’t ignore how thirsty I was. I’d never been in the infirmary before – I’d always just shoot myself if I had to – and didn’t know where anything was, but I’d been in enough doctor’s offices to guess right and check the cabinet over the sink for some cups. When I was done, I put the cup in the sink and stood there for a while and stared out the window until I was ready to get on with things and leave the infirmary. I was in my shirt and pants and had to look for my boots, and my suit was on top of the counter folded all nicely with my mask on top of it.

At that point, it didn’t seem worth it to put it on. I just pulled on my boots over my bloody socks, grabbed my shit, and started the walk of shame to my room. I stopped in there long enough to see my flamethrower was lying on the floor and move it to my bed, and grab my axe and shotgun.

Everyone but Medic was out in the hallway staring at the little freak.

I grinned at them. “HELLO! And how the fuck are you all doing?”

“Um,” Demo started.

“God, I just hate to bother you, but has anyone seen Medic?”

“Well,” Engineer said. “I think he’s –”

“Pyro,” Medic sighed, “I thought I had –”

I cocked my gun and shot him right in the face. At that range, everyone flinched at the noise, and Medic’s head wasn’t there anymore.

I stared at the body, then stepped over it on my way to the respawn room. I could hear everyone following me, and I was so far past giving a shit, they could watch if they fucking wanted.

About three minutes later Medic came back, shaking his head. “Pyro, if you please –”

I ran at him with my axe. Heavy started yelling in Russian, and everyone else held him back.

I got Medic with my shotgun the next two times he came back. Everyone cleared a path when I ran to my room and nobody said anything when I came back with my sledgehammer, which makes for a pretty fucking messy way to go, but since it was right in the respawn room, everything got cleaned up fast.

“If you would please –”

I didn’t want to hear him apologize, and didn’t give him the chance that time or the next.

“Oh, love, beatin’ him t’death with his own leg, that’s just embarassin’,” Sniper said.

“Fuck you!” I shouted back.

“So, ah,” Engineer cleared his throat, “So how many times…”

“Fifteen,” I huffed. “Gimme at least twenty.”

Respawn was working fine like it always did, but going through it so many times so close together was starting to take something out of Medic, who was taking his time getting up. “If you would please,” he said again, and he hadn’t said anything the last three times, so I let him talk. “Pyro, if I had known it would have caused –”

“Oh, fuck you.” I walked up to him and stared him right in the eyes. “Don’t give me that, you fucking knew, you always knew I didn’t want any of that shit done to me, goddamn it, you fucker, just – fuck you.”

He didn’t say anything but I could tell he was about to, so I shot him in the stomach and waited for him to come back.

“Pyro, please, I’m trying –”

“No, no, no, you don’t get it. This is a fucking shitton of shit, you didn’t have any goddamn right, you just wanted to know, you knew and you just took it, you don’t –”

I grabbed Engineer’s pistol and shot Medic in the head, and he went down with a wet gurgle. I handed it back to Engineer and smiled. “Now I’m done.”

I stomped back to my room, and this time nobody followed me. I slammed the door and waited.

It took a while, long enough to make me wish I had a goddamn book to read, but eventually the doorknob jiggled and someone knocked. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Can I come in?” Scout yelled through the door.

“Fine.”

“You’re not gonna kill me soon as I get inside?”

“No.”

“You ain’t lyin’?”

“No!”

“You gonna unlock the door?”

As soon as he was inside I closed it behind him and sat back down on the bed. He stood there for a while, looking at everything but me, until he pulled out the chair and turned it around so he could sit and face me. I stared at him until he stopped staring at his hands and looked up at me. “So I wanted to, we wanted to ask,” he looked back down at his hands and shook his head. “Aw, Jesus, this is just too freakin’ weird. It’s just, I mean,” he looked back up at me. “It’s –”

“What?”

“I don’t know!” He jumped up and started pacing. “It’s like we already knew you, but we didn’t and we knew that and we were fine with that, but we did know you and even if I didn’t know who you were under there like know-know I already did, and now I don’t know you, and, and nobody does, and it didn’t matter before ’cause nobody had any fuckin’ idea what you might be under there but now we do so now we gotta get to know you all over again but I already knew you even if I didn’t, and Christ, Pyro, four years, I know you four fucking years and I never, I, nobody thought what you might be. Jesus, you could’ve been a fuckin’ sack of potatoes for –”

“Wait, potatoes? You seriously thought I was some potatoes in a chemsuit?”

“Okay, maybe not seriously, but someone, maybe.” He sat back down. “It was at Gorge that pretty much everyone was out drinkin’ some of Demo’s hooch and we were gettin’ really plastered and started guessing what you might be and someone said you could be potatoes and no I don’t remember who but someone did and I said no way you could be because they wouldn’t get picked up in respawn unless all of them got tagged and then I think I passed out.” He hunched his shoulders in. “I don’t remember anythin’ else ’til I woke up in the morning, so I guess that’s what happened. Maybe Heavy took me inside.”

I nodded and waited and he didn’t say anything else. “So what the fuck do you want?” Scout jerked his head up, twisted his mouth, and I said it again, “What the fuck do you want?”

“What – what, come on, you think I want somethin’?”

“I fucking know you do, so what the fuck is it?”

“Look, I don’t want anything from you, alright?”

“Bullshit. What the fuck –”

“Does it even matter if I want somethin’ from you? Does it?”

“Yeah, yeah it fucking matters, so what the fuck is it?” I stopped to swallow. “Did anyone asked you, someone fucking asked you to see how I’m doing –”

“Nobody asked me to do nothin’, okay? It’s just me here, and I don’t want somethin’ from you, I just wanna see you’re okay, what the fuck does it matter if I do? You think – Jesus, Pyro, you think this fucking matters? Nobody gives a shit that you’re a Jap, nobody gives a –”

“Chink,” I spat.

“Huh?” He pulled back in the chair and blinked, and I kept glaring.

“Chink. If you’re gonna use a slur, you could at least get it right.” Fuck knows I’d heard it enough.

He hunched his shoulders in again and went back to staring at the floor. “Sorry.”

“You fucking should be.”

It took him about a minute to get his voice back. “Yeah, well, nobody gives a shit ’bout that. Nobody gives a shit you’re a girl, either, ’cept maybe you. And we don’t, so you don’t gotta if you don’t wanna.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better.”

“Kinda. Maybe.”

“I’m just gonna walk out of here, go sit down and watch TV, nobody’s gonna mind I’m not wrapped up in my uniform, everyone can see me and it doesn’t matter.”

“Well sure.”

“Fuck you.”

“That your answer to everything? Just go fuck it, don’t even care, put on your mask, muhmuhmuh nobody knows who I am so it don’t matter?”

“Goddammit, Scout, it fucking matters, this was the one place – the one place I ever had where who I was didn’t matter, you don’t get it, you never had anyone point at you and say look at them, it never mattered what’s on my face, what’s my face, and now I don’t have it here ’cause everyone fucking knows and it doesn’t matter anymore and it’s gone and no, yes, it matters, it mattered. So if you wanna tell me, what the fuck do you want?”

“Nothin’. I don’t want nothin’.” He shoved the chair back and didn’t turn around to look at me. “We ship out in three days,” he said, and slammed the door behind him.

Nobody else came by. I could hear them walking up and down the hallway and talking to each other, and I started playing with my Zippo to take my mind off it. When my stomach started growling, it wouldn’t be fucking worth it to suit up for a goddamn bowl of soup when everyone knew, so I just put on clean socks, pulled on my boots, and stomped out to get some lunch. Let them fucking stare if they wanted, it didn’t matter anymore.

There was no way I’d be able to spend the next three days holed up in my room, not unless I wanted to bore myself out of my fucking skull. The day after a victory, everybody would be hanging around the base, doing laundry or making more arrows or sleeping for sixteen hours, and the only way to avoid all that and my room was to get out of the base for a while. Thank fuck we had back doors and open gates. There wasn’t anywhere to go, but I could still kick out and start walking to get away from everyone else for a while.

There wasn’t anything to look at, fields and more fields and bales stacked up together and telephone wires and mountains off on the horizon. I jammed my hands down in my pockets and kept on walking, staring down at my boots kicking up dirt and grass and bits of whatever they grew to make the bales. Someone had ploughed it a while ago and it wasn’t like I knew enough about fields and farms to know more than that, just that it was a while ago because the last time I’d been at Granary it’d been in March a year ago and there’d been tall stuff growing around and now it was July and there wasn’t. I kicked a rock away and kicked another and it cracked in half, just hard dirt stuck together, and I stopped walking to start kicking at the ground and stomping on whatever my boots could find, and I was far enough from the base I could yell as loud as I could and know nobody could hear me.

I didn’t want my suit, even with all the dust I’d kicked up I didn’t want my fucking mask, but my thermoses would’ve been pretty goddamn nice to have right then, right about when I stopped thinking of new ways to insult the rest of the team. I stopped and braced my hands on my knees to take some deep breaths. I moved my hands up and down over my arms. I wasn’t nearly as hot as I’d be in my suit right about then, and it was a hell of a lot brighter without my mask – when I looked at the mountains and then looked back I knew I was seeing them better than I could with my mask on no matter how good I cleaned the lenses. I straightened up and rubbed my face and looked around and around at all the nothing until I turned and walked back.

If I’d been in a movie, or some crappy TV show, someone would’ve been out waiting for me at the gate, say hi, maybe invite me to eat dinner with everyone and show me things are okay. Maybe if I’d been in a movie someone would’ve followed me out into the fields, come running right after me or walking along to join me when I was kicking up dirt and looking at nothing. But I wasn’t, and nobody had followed me, nobody was waiting for me, and I don’t think anyone knew I’d been gone most of the afternoon.

That suited me just fucking fine.

I ate dinner like I ate lunch and took my shower late like I always did, locking the door just the same as usual. We never ran out of hot or cold water, some Australian recycling system down in the plumbing made sure we wouldn’t lost any, and so what if we ended up bathing in the same water we pissed in as long as it came out of the showerhead clean. I scrubbed the dirt out of my hair and off my skin and turned the water on cold to get the sunburn to stop itching. It’d been – fuck, it’d been years since I’d been outside wearing something that wasn’t a chemsuit or covered up head to toe. It’d just been for a few hours and as soon as I turned off the cold water it went back to tingling. It was more weird than anything else, and if it got bad and I started peeling I could just send myself through respawn to clear it up.

All of my other burns were too old for respawn or the medigun to deal with or fix; they were there when I got scanned, they weren’t injuries anymore, there wasn’t shit anyone could do about them outside of surgery, and I’d had more than enough of that dealing with them when they were new. I turned the water as hot as it’d go to get some steam in the room, and coughed out most of the dust and dirt I’d breathed in earlier.

When I went to brush my teeth, the mirrors were still fogged up, and I wiped my hand across one to clear the steam off and look at myself. I used to do this thing where I’d close my left eye and hold my hands up and tilt my head, and I’d pretend my whole face was that clear, and the parts I couldn’t see just weren’t reflected. I couldn’t pretend none of me was burned, but I hadn’t wanted to go the whole way like nothing had ever happened to me, just my face. It stopped working as soon as I put my hands down and opened my eye. I sighed and stuck my tongue out at my reflection the way I’d done when I was sixteen and the scars on my face were still new.

They weren’t on my whole face, but covered most of it, up and across from my chin and over my lips and left cheek, all the way up to my ear. The nurses had kept telling me I was lucky I still had so much intact. I hadn’t lost my nose or eyebrows, it’d only gotten some of my scalp, and my ear still looked like an ear, so I guess they were right – I’d seen people that’d melted like goddamn candles, everything pouring down, almost nothing left on the front of their head that said someone was looking at a face, cracks for a nose and slits for eyes. Real slits, not Asian eyelids, fuck you very much.

When I was ten I’d met a woman like that who had this whole routine set up to fake a face with a wig and make-up and a fake nose like in those old pirate movies. I’d asked her why she’d bothered and she’d told me that if she didn’t fake her face most people wouldn’t see her as a person. I’d never had that problem. People had always looked at me like I didn’t have a face even before I had scars there. Like I wasn’t from the United States, like my parents weren’t born in America, like my family hadn’t been here since my great-by-however-many-great grandparents got off the boats in the eighteen-forties. It wasn’t everywhere, but it could be anywhere, and just try dealing with the biggest asshole of a twelve-year-old that pulls at the corners of his eyes and starts making sing-song noises because the biggest asshole of a fourteen-year-old big brother told him that’s what Chinese people sound like.

Twelve-year-old girls aren’t supposed to punch people when they feel bad, they’re supposed to use their words instead, and nobody’s going to tell them to stop using their words just because they start with the bad ones. That wasn’t even the first time, or one of the worst, just one of the first ones that landed me in deep shit because people were watching. I got into so much shit with my parents, but it was worth it to see him on the ground and bloody because he didn’t think I’d fight back because I was a girl.

It always hurt more when people singled me out for being Chinese or having a vagina than for having burn scars. At least I had something to do with my scars. Being Chinese wasn’t something I could help anymore than I could help what I’d been born with between my legs. I’d just come out that way. All my scars were from when I didn’t know better, or if I was too angry to care, or when I wasn’t thinking right, but they were always because of me. I didn’t get any of my scars because someone else dropped a cigarette or crashed a car or threw gas on a bonfire or got lazy when they installed a house’s wiring or any of a million things that lands someone in a burn ward.

I hadn’t needed to get in and out of my suit between brushing my teeth and walking back to my room, but I hadn’t brought my pajamas with me, so I still had to put my flamethrower away and change for bed. After I took off my clothes I stopped for a minute and just stood there, and then lay down on top of the covers. The only blankets they had at Granary were these stupid yellow things the color of piss, but I’d slept under worse. Right now I really didn’t give a shit about them, or about much of anything. I just wanted to not go anywhere, and not think about anything, but there wasn’t any way for that to happen tonight. It took me a while to get to where I could get up and get my Zippo out and turn off the lights, and didn’t bother getting dressed – I just sat naked in the dark and watched the flame.

When most people saw me, they’d give me shit for anything about me they didn’t like, because the only reason I was around at all was to make them uncomfortable or upset. And if they weren’t giving me shit, they’d be looking around me or past me like I wasn’t fucking standing right there. Everything about me that I didn’t have anything to do with, or everything about me that was because of me, it didn’t fucking matter, because almost nobody who looked at me gave a shit. Most of the ones who did knew what that was like, and they still didn’t talk to me like I was someone who really mattered.

Then RED came in and told me I had a chance to ditch all of that. Some place where none of who I was mattered, where it was what I did and what I loved that counted, where I could make my own face and get the people around me to see me the way I wanted them to. It wasn’t just keeping my mask on to make sure nobody knew what was under it – it was getting them to see that what was under it didn’t fucking matter compared to what I was doing. And I fucking got them to.

Four years of that, blown to shit.

I flicked my lighter on and off, left it on to breathe and turned it off. I held it in my hands and looked around my room, and watched the dark come in.

14.

When I was six, the hills caught on fire. It wasn’t something that happened by accident – it wasn’t because of a forgotten campfire or a dropped cigarette or a freak summer lightning storm. Someone had set them on fire because they’d wanted to see them burn. It’d been a dry summer, after a dry year, and a long time later I found out people set fires all over the world to clear the land and clean out all the dead plants and make sure that the next fire that comes won’t be so big they can’t control it. But when I was six, it’d been a long time since anyone had set the hills on fire, and they burned like hell.

I was up near the hills with my family that day. My mother’s sister has some cousins and we were there for some celebration that I didn’t understand because I was six and all I cared about was getting away from the adults and exploring by myself. I came back for lunch, waited for my parents to finish showing me off, and went back outside when they were done. I came back when they called for me and my father had to come looking for me because I didn’t come back right away. I remember there was someone talking on the radio about something nearby, because so many people were sitting around and listening, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like how tight my dad’s hand was on my arm, and after he let go and wasn’t looking, I ran back outside.

I saw the smoke before I smelled it. I hadn’t seen smoke clouds coming over the horizon before, or ever, and first I thought it was a summer rainstorm, except Los Angeles doesn’t get rain in summer, so then I didn’t know what it could be. It was dark, so it could be fog like in San Francisco like I’d seen last year when my family went there for a long vacation. But it was darker than fog, and it was coming from the hills, not the ocean. I stood up, the grass tall enough to hit me at the waist, and I kept watching.

The smell came next. It was a huge smell, like candles or cook-fires but bigger and larger, rushing at me when the winds came faster. I covered my nose and mouth with my hands and kept breathing – I knew something was coming, I could feel it. I couldn’t stay there, and started running, going up the hill to get to the top so I could see what was coming sooner. Hills are bigger when you’re six, and it didn’t take me long to get up there but it felt like climbing a mountain.

I could see it and smell it better up there, the grass still hitting me at the waist, and I rubbed my eyes to get them clear when tears started coming, one at a time so I could keep watching. I waited and watched and everything kept coming.

Then I saw the fire.

It was still plenty far away. I wasn’t close enough to feel it on my face, but I could finally see it, and stopped breathing for a moment when I did. I’d seen fire, I’d seen candles and cook-fires and roasted marshmallows in fireplaces, and none of it had looked anything like this. It was huge – it covered the hills almost as far as I could see them, and it was free. That was the word I thought of when I saw it, free. All the other fires I’d seen had been tamed or caught or so small like a match they were nothing compared to what I was seeing, and I knew then, I knew somehow and I knew right, that it was beautiful.

It moved – I don’t know how it moved, just that it did, reaching up to the sky, opening itself to spread out and wide across the hills, more and more as I kept watching. It was bright and dark, so bright inside where I could see the flames, so dark at the edges where the smoke came out. It was dancing, it was flying, it was trying to reach out and cover the world. I knew it wouldn’t stop, that it’d keep burning, big and beautiful. Full of beauty. I hadn’t thought what the word was made of until then, and it fit. Full of beauty. It was dark and bright and glorious and I couldn’t look away, all the flames curving and curling and reaching for more, reaching away from itself, soaring. Burning everything away.

The smoke ripped through the air as the winds blew it closer, and the whole sky was gray. Bits of ash started to float by, and I didn’t watch them, just kept staring at the fire. There wasn’t anything else then. That was all there was for me, that was all there could be.

My father called out my name, grabbed me, and I yelled as he ran down the hill back to the house, threw me in the car and started driving. I looked out the back to where I knew it was, and he and my mother shouted and screamed at me for running away and putting myself in danger. I didn’t know how to tell them about what I’d seen, and couldn’t try, and kept my mouth shut. When I’d close my eyes, I’d think of the fire, and felt better.

It was all over the news everywhere, on TV and the radio and in the newspapers, and I saw so many pictures and heard so many people talking about it. But they didn’t show the whole thing the way I’d seen it on the hill, covering so much and so beautiful. I drew so many pictures to try to show my parents but they didn’t see what I wanted them to. I learned how dangerous it was from everyone talking about it and from all the pictures of what came after it was gone, but I didn’t really understand until that fall, when my mother’s parents built a cook-fire in their pit in their backyard. It was the biggest fire I’d seen since that day, and it was so much closer, I could feel the heat on my face, and it was so much smaller than the fire on the hills and it was still so beautiful.

I wanted to pick it up to show it to my parents, and stuck my hands into the flames.

15.

The first couple of times I woke up, I rolled over and went back to sleep. When I finally got out of bed, it was pretty late in the morning, maybe nine, and there were still two days to go until we shipped out. I had to find something to pass the time besides long walks off the base. Cleaning my weapons could work to kill a few hours if I did it slow enough – it wouldn’t fill up both days, or even all of one, but it was a start. I needed breakfast, too. Nobody was around the kitchen when I got some old noodles-and-tomato-sauce from the fridge or when I went back to wash the plate, and I wasn’t going looking for them. It’d only be a couple of hours until they started wandering back for lunch, so the kitchen was out. So was doing it outside, or lugging everything back and forth between here and some other part of the base.

I grabbed my shotgun and its cleaning kit and pulled the little coffee table in front of the TV closer to the sofa. This time of day and this time of year there wouldn’t be anything good on, but even if there was that wasn’t why I planted myself in front of it and started getting the kit set up. If anyone had a problem with me being here, they could tell me to my goddamn face.

After I sat down I got up and turned the TV on anyway, and kept the sound down low. Some dead guys in black-and-white and overcoats talked to each other in an alleyway and I started taking my gun apart. If I was in a hurry, I could clean my shotgun in maybe thirty minutes, but I wanted to take my time with it today. And if I did it right, my flamethrower could take me the whole afternoon.

I was almost done with the barrel when Heavy walked by. I could see his reflection in the TV, and glared at it when he did a double-take and stopped walking for a moment. It’s just one of your teammates sitting on the couch, you asshole. He didn’t say anything, just got his feet moving again and kept on going, and I turned the volume up a bit in case he started talking to someone in earshot and moved onto the firing pin. Soldier was next, and if he noticed me at all I couldn’t tell. I polished even harder.

The movie ended with the killer getting away with it and the girl standing at a corner under a streetlamp waiting for him to come back, and there were only a couple of commercials before another one started. I didn’t know that one, either, something about a newspaper with everyone walking around faster than in the last movie, and I turned it off when I went to get something to eat. By then, maybe half the team had come and gone and eaten lunch or grabbed something to eat somewhere else, and I knew how to skip a meal but never liked doing it, and my room still locked from the inside. The first container I grabbed was some leftover stew Demo made out of the canned eggplant about a week ago, and when I was done with the dishes, went to get started on my flamethrower.

I wanted to keep working in front of the TV, but I knew better than to do my flamethrower there – it’s not built to come apart as easy as any of my guns, so if I wanted the space to do it right, I had to move to the main locker room. I’d really have liked to do it in Engineer’s shop, but that wasn’t something I could pull off asking for right now. So I grabbed a couple of extra towels when I passed the closet in the hall, set everything out on a bench, and got to work.

I’d barely gotten anything done when Medic came in. I tried to ignore him, but he kept standing just at the edge of the room and looking at me. I kept trying, and he just kept on standing there.

“What the fuck do you want?”

“I –” He coughed. “Pyro, I wished to ask –”

“Yeah?”

“I was curious about your scars. I noticed not all of them had healed in the same way, and wanted to know what treatments you received for them.”

I put the towel down and looked at him. He was still standing there, hands behind his back, not going anywhere, and I knew if I told him to fuck off he’d fucking well fuck off. I was about to, but stopped. He hadn’t asked how I was doing, how I was feeling, if I knew kung fu, none of that bullcrap. He hadn’t asked me how much they’d hurt, or if they went all the way down, or told me how normal I still looked, or any shit like that. He just wanted to know what’d happened in the hospitals.

“Oh, um, a couple of them got skin grafts. Not all of them.” I held out my hands. “These didn’t. The ones on my face and back, didn’t. But I got them for the ones on my chest and arm.” He nodded. “With my hands, it was just bandaging them up with the Vaseline and the silver nitrate.” I pointed up-and-down-and-around over my chest, where I’d dropped a match on my sweatshirt after someone surprised me when I’d thought I was alone. “This one wasn’t as bad, not as deep, so it just hurt like fuck and healed up okay.”

“Those did look quite evenly healed.”

The more I talked the easier it was to keep going. I moved my right hand up and down my left arm to my face and down my side where I’d been sixteen and forgot what happens when you’re too angry to think about what happens when you pour gasoline right onto a fire. I pointed up-and-down on my side and over the left side of my chest. “Over here, this needed some skin grafts and I got some from my back.” That was after they’d scraped off the dead stuff every day for almost two weeks, and that hurt worse than the burns. “My face didn’t get any grafts since it was shallow enough to heal just with bandages, but they had me do oxygen treatments for it. My arm was doing okay until it started contracting, so they had to cut into the burn to make sure it wouldn’t tighten up, then something went wrong with that and I got this infection where I had to take these antibiotics that almost trashed my kidneys.”

“That can happen, yes.”

I jerked a thumb over my shoulder to point at my back and down my legs, where I’d gotten thrown from the explosion when I’d tried for a building, the thing I did that finally got me RED’s attention. “That, it was about as bad as my stomach, so they just did the silver nitrate and oxygen treatments and kept me in a pressure vest.” I shrugged. “That’s it.”

He nodded. “Thank you for telling me.” I waited for him to say something else, and he must’ve been waiting for me to say something because he coughed again. “Yes.”

Oh, fuck it. “So what did you do before RED? You were a doctor, right?”

“I was a surgeon.”

“What kind?”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Trauma.”

“Hey, that’s pretty cool. So that’s why you’re so good at putting us back together?”

“Ja. It was – quite nice.”

“Then why’d you quit that and join the team?”

“I assure you, it was not voluntary.” He made that ‘I’m gonna gut you’ smile he did with all of his teeth and crossed his arms over his chest. “The offer RED made to me was quite tempting. I assume yours was as well.”

“You bet your ass it was. So this, whatever non-voluntary thing, what was it?”

“Well. It was decided by – they decided that they had no use for me.” His lips curled up and he looked down at his arms. “Things – changed after that, and then, even then for a long time, I had very little. Then six years ago, RED made its offer to me. So here I am.”

“Oh.” I used that same voice when I gave people the super-condensed version of my life, and I’d had enough of them keep on prying to know not to do it to someone else. “Good to see you here, I guess.”

“Thank you.”

I picked the towel back up and gestured over my flamethrower. “I’ll just get back to this –”

“Ja, yes.” He left, and I went back to cleaning it. Nobody else came in, and when I was done, it was almost dinner, so nobody was around to bug me or ask me shit when I took it around back to make sure it was working right. I stopped at my room to suit up and put my mask on because I’m not a fucking idiot, and when I was pulling my mask down it hit me I didn’t need to keep them on when I was done. It wasn’t like they didn’t know. I’d known that the moment Medic hadn’t said anything, but that was when it hit me. Like a goddamn bullet.

My flamethrower worked just as well as the day I made it, and it took me a while to go inside when I was done. I grabbed some dinner on the way back to my room, some glop with beans Soldier made and probably yelled at while he cooked that was actually pretty good, and I didn’t suit back up to drop the dishes in the sink. It was dark enough some stars were coming out, so I went back outside to take a look. It’d been years since I’d seen them without anything in the way; the closest was a while back at Sawmill when I’d opened my window a little, but that wasn’t the same as walking into the fields and leaning back to take them all in. Most of the lights in the base were off and we were out in the back end of nowhere and far enough away from everyone else on the planet for everything to be super-clear. I didn’t know what most of them were, I didn’t need to know shit like that growing up in a city, and I didn’t need it now, but I could see why people cared about them. I leaned farther back and almost fell down until I got my feet back under me and turned around to look back at the Milky Way – at least I knew what the fuck that big bright streak was. A breeze started up and tossed some of the grass around, and without my mask on I could hear all of it going on. Without my suit, I could feel the wind moving on my skin, and started running my hands up and down my arms.

I didn’t go back inside right away, just back to the base where I could still keep looking. Even in the hills, LA is way too fucking smoggy to get anything but a few of the bigger stars and maybe the planets, and you can just kiss New York City’s ass if you think it’s going to turn any of its lights off. The BLU half of the base went dark a while ago, and most of ours was shut down too.

“Nice night,” Engineer said quietly, walking up to lean against the wall a few feet away.

I kept looking up at the sky. He didn’t move.

“Is there something you want?”

“No, just enjoyin’ the night, nothin’ more.”

“No, really, what the fuck do you want?”

He sighed. “Pyro, I don’t want a thing from you.” He said each word with the same amount of force in that quiet voice he used in battle sometimes right before he tore a BLU a new one. “I’m here to stargaze, and if y’all want to stay outside, that’s your decision, and if you don’t, it’s just fine by me.”

“Fine by me too.”

“All right.”

We stood there for a while, listening to the little night sounds that get lost when I’ve got my mask on or I have to cap a point or lay down cover fire, and looking up at the stars.

“I just gotta ask, do you need to swear so much?”

“What the fuck do you mean?”

“Well.” He sucked in a breath. “Where I come from, most people aren’t given to such language with anything near your frequency of usage.”

“So what’ve you got instead?”

“We just don’t use it.”

“Bullshit, you gotta have something.”

“Oh, we’ve got them all and then some, but we won’t employ them if the situation doesn’t warrant it.”

“And if it does?”

“You do your best to find ways around it.”

“Like what?”

“Like I said, you find ways around it.” He shifted his weight and crossed his arms. “Women might say ‘sugar.’”

“Sugar.”

“Or fudge.”

“Fudge?” He shrugged. “Why? You know what they want to say, so why don’t they go ahead and use that?”

“It’s a little more polite, a little more ladylike.”

I couldn’t help it; I had to laugh. “Well, fuck that.”

Engie pushed his goggles up to give me a look like he had no fucking idea what to do with me, in a good way – trust me, I know the difference. “You really don’t have to swear so much, you know.”

“No, I really do.”

“And why is that?”

“Nobody listens if you say ‘please excuse me.’ They hear you if you say ‘get the fuck out of my way.’”

“I can’t say I ever considered that.”

“Figured you wouldn’t.”

“Well.” He pulled his goggles back and kept talking while he adjusted them. “How’s about I try to break you of that habit, now that you don’t need to keep it up? Maybe a swear jar, I’ll keep track. A nickel every time.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“That’ll be a nickel.”

“What?”

“Five cents. One-twentieth of a dollar.” He looked back at me and laughed. “You thought the first one would be free?”

16.

The next day, I did what I could to keep going. I had laundry to wash, I had to clean my shit out of my room, I had to deal with everyone wanting to talk to me but not being able to come out and just fucking say something. When I went to get some lunch, Sniper and Spy were eating together in the kitchen, and they both stopped talking to watch me. They didn’t start up again, which told me they were still watching me, even though I wasn’t doing anything more exciting than getting some of the roasted rabbit from last night.

I closed the fridge and turned around to look right back at them, full-on eye contact. “So what’s new with you fuckers?”

“Can’t think of much,” Sniper said.

“We were discussing translations when you arrived,” Spy answered.

“Translations of what?”

“Books. Sniper tells me you’ve heard of them.”

I wasn’t going to give him any satisfaction. “What books?”

He waved a hand in the air like he wanted to get rid of some smoke. “Some novels, a few romances, nothing you would know, I can assure you. It was a discussion as to how effective words can be when put in other languages. I mean to speak to Heavy about it as well, and Medic.” He rested his chin on his hands and smiled. “Perhaps you have something to say on the subject?”

I told him, in Mandarin, to go fuck himself and the goat-humping whore mother he crawled out of, grabbed my lunch, and walked out. My parents wanted a good American daughter, but they wanted a good Chinese one too, and that meant learning the mother tongue.

It was pretty nice to get those expressions on their faces. My accent was pretty much shit since I never spoke it much except at home and at my grandparents’. These days I just used it to make sure nobody spat in my take-out and they put enough sauce on the fish balls, and most places were happy enough to get someone who spoke the language that they didn’t care the words didn’t sound exactly right.

I spent most of the afternoon kicking around the base, not doing shit, looking at all the data-link computer stations next to the rockets and the stuff tacked on the bulletin boards – nothing interesting, just memos and lists and other office crap – before I went back outside to get some air on my skin. When I started walking around the freight cars, I realized this would be a great place to get Scout to play hide-and-seek, and I had to slap myself because just because I didn’t get to play that as a kid and he played catch with me didn’t mean shit now, I shouldn’t think like that.

I managed to avoid everyone else for the rest of the day by moving around and not staying in one place for more than five minutes. A big walking tour of the place, where I’d gotten the BLU Heavy from behind the first day, where Soldier and I teamed up against their Demo, where their Spy got me, where I got their Spy back. I went out the back into the fields again around dinner, to make sure I’d definitely avoid everyone, and waited long and hard to give myself a good chance that nobody would be around when I got dinner or when I went for my shower.

When the train came to pick us up, Sniper and Spy kicked around before saying good-bye along with Engineer – I think Sniper was driving Spy to an airport, but I was beyond giving a fuck about him except that he was one less person in the train. There was no way, no fucking way I’d be able to avoid everyone for the whole ride – I was pretty much taking it all the way back to New York – but with my mask on, I had a chance they’d leave me alone. So I sat in the back corner by the window and closed my eyes and waited for the train to start moving and rock me into a nap.

Heavy and Medic were already sitting all the way up front, talking about what they’d do when they got to Medic’s apartment in Chicago. Soldier sat a few seats in front of me, yelling out something about Genghis Khan and empires until he got shut up by Demo and Scout when they sat down across from him. When we got moving, I couldn’t hear anything over Scout bugging Demo to teach him a drinking song.

“How old are ye, nineteen? There’s no way ye’re old enough t’hear th’good ones.”

“Come on, Cyclops, you know I’m almost twenty-three.”

“Well, ye still look nineteen.”

“Ah, screw you, Medic, Heavy, either a’you know –”

Medic sighed. “Whatever you’re asking about, I promise you we do not.”

“But you guys gotta –”

“Even if we do, we will not share today,” Heavy said.

“All right, fine, jeez, leave me outta the pillow talk at least, Soldier, you know any?”

“Never had much chance to sing and drink with company, but if you want a ballad I know more than a few.”

“Great, let’s have one.”

It was an hour before Soldier and Demo got off to catch other connecting trains, and it was the longest fucking hour of any train ride I’d ever had working for RED, even longer than the last hour before I’d pulled into Teufort way back when. Scout went to bother Medic and Heavy until it was their turn to get off, and I shifted to lean against the window when I heard them walking out and talking quietly. That should’ve been my tip-off, but Demo’s singing was still running through my skull.

“Hey, c’mon, what’cha doin’ back here?” Fuck me twice on Sunday. I opened my eyes to see Scout leaning over the back of the seat in front of me and closed them again. “An’ what the hell you wearin’ your mask for? It ain’t like I don’t know what’s under there, you don’t need to keep wearin’ it, come on it’s like six hours to Boston and there’s nobody else around so it’s just the two of us and it’s not like I got someone else to talk to, you don’t need to keep on pouting like –”

“For fuck’s sake, give it a rest.”

“Okay, that there that’s what I’m talkin’ about, I know you said somethin’ an’ it’s really freakin’ hard to have a conversation when I gotta spend half my time guessin’ what’s comin’ outta your mouth, you could just cut the crap and don’t you even think of ignorin’ me, I grew up with seven brothers and this ain’t nothin’ to Thanksgiving dinners. I can do this all day don’t matter if you’re payin’ attention or not, be better for me if you did but if you wanna spend the whole time ignorin’ me and napping I guess I can’t stop you but –”

I flipped him off.

“Oooh, yeah, real mature there, Pyro. You got anythin’ else to say or is it all just one big fuck-you under there? I know you’re payin’ attention, come on come on it ain’t like you got somethin’ else to do right now.”

I opened my eyes again, and sat up close enough where his breath started fogging up the lenses. He didn’t move back. “So what’s up with you?” I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t either. He just pulled his mouth open at the corners, stuck his tongue out and rolled his eyes, and mumbled some sort of “nnnnyyyyyyaaaaaahhh” sound. When I didn’t move, he did it again, and again, then did a raspberry and got spit all over my lenses. When I still didn’t move, he flopped down to put his chin on the back of the seat. “What’s it fuckin’ take, man?”

I wiped off my lenses.

“Look, don’t gimme that, don’t you gimme that.” He pushed himself back up and pointed a finger at me. “I know you wanna go back to bein’ nothin’ under there but you ain’t gonna so just come on and talk to me, why don’t ya, just fuckin’ talk to me.”

The train started moving with a huge lurch and Scout falling forward and yelling, “Sonofabitch!” It smoothed out pretty quick, and Scout got back onto his knees with one of those ‘I meant to do that’ faces. He tugged at his cap to straighten it out, then smiled.

“Hey, wanna see something neat?” He didn’t wait for me to say anything before he jumped over the seats to sit down next to me and started pulling his left sock down and his left pant leg up while I scrambled back to hug the window.

“Scout, what the hell –”

“So what’cha think of this baby?” He pointed to a scar in his leg about the size of a quarter. Maybe a little bigger. I leaned in to take a closer look – it was deep enough that I could see it dip into his leg, like someone’d scraped it out. It was sort of diamond-shaped, definitely fatter in the middle and darker than the rest of the skin around it, and it was even shiny the way scars can get sometimes. He smoothed out the hair around it and I noticed it wasn’t the same texture all over; it had a couple of deeper, darker spots inside and at the bottom edges with the raised shiny parts around on the sides and on top.

“Pretty neat, ain’t it?” He rolled his sock back up and pulled his pant leg back down. “Biggest one I got.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” he said, and slouched down to curl up on the seat.

“Where’d you get that fucker?”

“What was that again? Can’t hear you, you wanted to know how many – hey!” He pushed himself back into the seat when I shoved past him to get to the bathroom. I could hear him yelling, and he stopped when I came out with my mask under my arm. “You really think you gotta keep – oh.”

I put my mask down on the seats across the aisle, next to my flamethrower, and went to sit back down in my seat. I smiled, then pointed at his bare leg and asked, “So where’d you get that thing?”

“Oh. Right, right, from back home in Boston, you know? I was ’bout twelve, runnin’ around with three of my brothers an’ six of their friends and we were tryin’ to climb up walls and jump over stuff and I was just tryin’ to keep up, I tried to clear this brick wall maybe about this high,” he held his hand out to show me. “An’ I thought I could, I could’ve if I’d climbed it but all three of the bastards jumped it, so I had t’jump it, and I didn’t make it, just almost made it, and fell down on the edge and scraped my leg open.”

“Shit,” I said. “How much did that hurt?”

“Oh, man, it was the worst thing ever, I was twelve and I’d never gotten really hurt before, it had me screamin’ my freakin’ head off and dogs on the other side of town were howling I was so loud. My brothers ran back and they took a look at it and said I wasn’t bleedin’ out and it wasn’t bleedin’ too hard but we’d better go home anyway ’cause it was so deep we could see white stuff comin’ out an’ we didn’t know what that was. So we had to go home early, and two of ’em helped me wash it and put a Band-Aid on it and it still hurt but I wasn’t bleedin’ too bad anymore so I thought it’d heal fine. But then Ma comes home from work and she sees I got a cut and she has me show her and then it’s her turn to start screamin’ her freakin’ head off, Oh god can’t you see he’s cut into his leg, oh god oh god.” He laughed. “So we all get in the car an’ rush me to the hospital, an’ when we get there they told us I scraped it past all the skin down to the fat an’ that’s what the white stuff was but they can’t do nothin’ for me ’cause we waited too long for stitches to do any good for it. So we hadda leave it alone and let it heal up from underneath.”

He laced his fingers together behind his head and leaned back, pressing his feet up against the back of the seats in front of us. “Yeah, biggest one I got and a pretty neat story goin’ with it.” He nodded, laughed, and said, “But it ain’t nothin’ to what you got. Nobody’s got anything close to what you got, for scars I mean, an’ that’s pretty cool.”

“Most people wouldn’t call them that.”

“Yeah, but we ain’t most people, remember?” He grinned and shifted around to face me, one leg dangling off the seat. “You should see some of the scars the other guys got.”

“If it means showering with them, you can count me the fuck out.”

“Hey, I wasn’t – I mean, if you wanted t’start, I sure wouldn’t mi– hey!” I grabbed him in a headlock, ripped his cap off, and started rubbing my knuckles hard on his head. “Uncle, uncle, you win, leggo!” He took his cap back and made a show of dusting it off and putting it back on. “An’ as I was sayin’, you should see the scars they all got.”

I moved up to sit cross-legged and lean back against the window. “So why don’t you tell me?” He looked at me like he didn’t believe what I just said. “It’s not like we’ve got somewhere else to be right now.”

Scout nodded, smiled, and started talking. He did Soldier first, going up and down his body to show where everything was, twisting around to point to spots on his legs and arms and back and telling me stories Soldier told him about Polish lynxes and hidden Nazi bunkers and failed rocket jump tests and exactly the sort of crazy shit that made Soldier into Soldier. Demo was next, and I knew about his eye and I’d seen all the little chemical burns on his hands, but I didn’t know they went all the way up and down his arms and all over his chest. I didn’t know Engie had thick scars on his right hand from some welding accident in college, and Scout did a great imitation when he said Engie told him that ‘people’ve lost more for less.’

He kept talking about Heavy’s bullet scars when he grabbed a sandwich and soda out of his bag, and stopped just long enough to ask me if I had anything. When I said no, he grabbed another sandwich and handed it over.

Medic didn’t have anything worth talking about but Sniper had a fucking mess of them all over his body, animals and knives and whatever crazy shit you find in Australia. Spy had a few that probably came from fights with knives and fights with guns and maybe a fight with an eagle, but what was better than his scars were his tattoos.

“Spy has tattoos?”

“Yeah. Medic’s got one too but his – that one – yeah, it’s just one. Spy’s got six of ’em all on his chest and they’re freakin’ awesome, three of ’em are little pictures, you know, feathers an’ flowers and little pattern things, and three of ’em are words in some language I got no idea what it is an’ he never tells me, the one time I ask him what they all said he just told me they were a recipe for some cookies but I didn’t believe him. No way they could be, come on, someone can’t have just one word to say all the salt an’ sugar an’ flour and everythin’ else that goes into cookies, even the pictures can’t say all that.”

He curled up in his seat and shook his head. “You know he’s the one who said the most about you when we all…”

This was new. “No, I don’t, when you all what?”

“When we…” He took a big breath. “It was right after you’d gone to town on Medic, we were all talkin’ in the locker room an’ tryin’ to figure out what to do next, Medic was mostly tryin’ to not throw up but he was there too, an’ nobody knew what we were supposed to do and then Soldier was there bein’ all roar roar nobody tells anyone what they wanna do in life, roar, let her fight if she wants, roar. An’ then Spy agrees with him, an’ nobody saw that comin’ not even Sniper, an’ he talks about how you had reasons for whatever and all. An’ then we kept talking an’ then we stopped an’ then I went t’see you.”

Scout’s hands moved a lot when he talked, not just to point to where a scar was on someone’s back or to mime grenade launching or to emphasize himself to make sure I knew what the fuck he meant. A lot of it was just to move around because he always had to move, and he hadn’t moved when he talked about everyone talking about me.

I had no fucking idea what the fuck to say to that. I looked out the window at the sunset rolling by, then back at Scout. “Thanks for telling me.”

“Hey, no problem. Just, just don’t tell anyone I told you, okay? I don’t think they’d like it if they knew I talked about it.”

I couldn’t help it and started grinning, and snorted out a laugh.

“Aw, come on, what’s so funny?”

“Scout, you just – you realize you just asked me to not say something, right?” It took him a moment to get it; when he did, he glared and blew another raspberry at me, and he was smiling when he did it.

About an hour later the lights inside the train came on, white and sterile like in a hospital, and made everything look like it didn’t have a shadow. I couldn’t see anything outside except black unless I leaned in right against the window and cupped my hands around my eyes. Scout joined me and started fidgeting even more when bits of the next town started popping up in the distance. When we pulled into the junction where he’d catch another train to take him to Boston, he was at the door before we stopped, and yelled back at me, “See you next mission!” without waiting to hear if I said anything back.

I curled up in my seat and watching the dark go by and stayed quiet the rest of the ride to my own junction. Just before the train pulled into the station, I put my mask back on, and when I got off the train, I was finally able to get out of my goddamn suit. It took me a while longer than normal to get back into my street clothes, fuck me if I knew why, but sitting on the toilet with the door locked and my suitcase open, I just didn’t feel like I had to get everything covered up right away. The train wasn’t going to board for forty fucking minutes, I could take one or two to yawn and stretch before I got my shirt on and got all my luggage packed up safe.

I watched New York come into view as it changed from lights in the distance to lights in the dark around the train, then finally to just lights all around the train before it went underground, where there were still lights in the dark around the train. When I finally got off, it was way past midnight and thank fuck it didn’t take me long to catch a taxi. The driver looked as tired as I felt, and didn’t ask for a conversation after I refused to let him touch my goddamn luggage. I watched the city change from Manhattan to Brooklyn, over the bridge and out and down to Flatbush, way out to Beverly Road, and when he pulled up in front of my building I told him to stick around until after I got everything upstairs. It took me two trips, and when I paid him, I just gave the guy a hundred dollar bill and told him to keep the change. No fucking way was I going to deal with anything involving thinking about something more complicated than getting a key in a lock.

I got back up the stairs and into my place, locked the door behind me, and let myself relax. I’d unpack later, after some sleep. When I got to the bedroom, and my huge and wonderful bed, I sat down and fell back with my arms wide open with all my clothes on. I knew I could fall asleep like that, except I couldn’t. So I pulled myself up, got to my feet, and started taking everything off, one thing at a time. Hat, glasses, scarf, gloves, shirt, shoes, pants, socks, bra, boxers, and a moment to stand there totally naked to rub my hands all over and scratch the weird indents the tighter things left in my skin. Then I kicked it all to the side, my pajama shorts and top came on, and I had to stand and sway for a minute before going to turn off the light.

17.

RED had offices all over the world. I’d been to a few, and they pretty much all looked exactly the same; the one in New York City looked like all of the other eight-to-twelve-story office buildings in southern Manhattan. Even inside, it looked like pretty much anything I’d find in one of the other office buildings – a law firm or some accounting office or another kind of business that needed a waiting room with uncomfortable fuzzy chairs, bland art on the walls, potted plants, magazines, and a receptionist doing whatever the fuck it was that receptionists did. Right now, this one with straight brown hair, a cardigan tied around her shoulders, and a large smile was talking on the phone. “Yes, Bergstrom, I can assure – no, not personally – if you’d like me to send Miss – no, Bergstrom, I don’t mean her – that sounds like a much better solution – yes, all of them – yes, by the end of the week. Thank you, and have a good morning.”

She hung up, closed her eyes and ran a hand through her hair, and went back to something with the papers on her desk. I waited for her to notice me standing there, and it only took her a couple of minutes. She glanced up, then went back to her papers.

“If you wait a few minutes, I’ll be right with you.”

I pulled off my scarf and kept my sunglasses on. “I’d really like to talk to someone now if I could.”

“I’m sorry, but –”

“I called you about this yesterday. You said ten in the morning for the class details, remember?” She stopped and looked up at me, and I knew she could see my mouth when I smiled. “Meeting with the Pyro?”

“Oh my goodness, I am so, so sorry, I had no idea it was you.”

“It’s fine,” I said. It’s the whole point of the get-up. “You’re just being careful. You didn’t fuck anything up.”

She blinked a couple of times. “I’ll see if Miss Roberts is in.”

A few minutes later, when I was halfway through reading an editorial about what the end of the US-Chinese trade embargo meant for Mann Company, Miss Roberts came into the waiting area and invited me to her office. We walked past some empty conference rooms and a bunch of cubicles with people talking or typing and a little break area that had a pot of coffee going before she led me inside her office and closed the door behind her.

She sat down and laced her fingers together in front of her on the desk. “I’ve been told you’d like to review your contract.”

“I would, yes.”

“Renegotiation of any salient points and features isn’t permitted until at least five years’ employment –”

“I don’t want to renegotiate anything, I just want to read it. And I don’t have a copy, so I figured I’d check at the local home office.”

She nodded. “May I ask why?”

“Does it matter? I just want to read it again. I haven’t read the fucking thing since I signed it.”

Her hands tightened for a moment. “All right.” She spun her chair to look at the computer, type something into it, then spun around to look back at me. “I’ll be right back. One moment.”

I timed her with the little green clock on the bookcase. She took eight minutes, but she came back with a folder with a copy of my contract in it, and she handed it to me instead of putting it down and letting me pick it up like she could catch something from us touching it at the same fucking time.

“Would you prefer to read it in private? There are some conference rooms –”

“Sure, that’d be cool.”

“All right,” she said, and soon I was reading all twenty-four pages of my contract in private – at least as private as I could get in here, anyway – and double-checking and triple-checking each fucking word. All of them. I wanted to be certain beyond everything I could think of that nobody on the team had broken any of what was in it, especially me. If nobody had, great, we were all fucking hunky-dory. If someone had, then we were fucked six ways from Sunday.

It turned out we weren’t. My privacy wasn’t protected by contract, and it wasn’t guaranteed by it. My own personal privacy wasn’t anywhere in it, even in the eight pages on confidentiality and what that meant and how to keep it safe and what happened if I didn’t. Sure, I couldn’t discuss the contract itself with anyone, even the rest of the team, and I couldn’t tell anyone who wasn’t on the team shit about what I did for a living. But it wasn’t in there anywhere that I was required to shower alone, or I was always guaranteed a door with a lock, or that if someone found out what I’d kept under my mask they’d get some sort of punishment for infringing on my privacy. Keeping my privacy and my face to myself hadn’t ever been anyone’s fucking concern but mine.

When they’d contacted me, I barely knew how to negotiate, and even if I’d known I could I doubt I would’ve known the right way to ask for what I’d wanted back then. I’d gotten myself expunged from just about everything that’d associated me with who I’d been, and that was fucking wonderful, but I hadn’t thought to ask for them to make sure I’d keep my privacy. I’d just thought I’d be able to do it myself, and keep it that way. It hadn’t been my fault it’d gone to shit the way it did.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the camera in the corner, and smiled at it. With everything that’d happened to me in the last four years and the people I’d spent it with, four years of privacy was pretty fucking good.

Miss Roberts’ door was closed, but I didn’t bother knocking and just sat down in the chair I’d used before. I held up my contract folder and asked, “Can I keep this?”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid not – it’s a confidential item, and it’s not allowed to leave the offices.”

“Just checking.” I tossed it down onto her desk. “Thanks for getting it for me.”

“Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“I’ll let you know, how’s that sound?”

I put my scarf back on before I left and figured it was so nice out I might as well walk back to my place. I knew I could stop and get a train or a cab if I wanted, and I could keep going if I didn’t, so I kept on walking down to City Hall and over the Brooklyn Bridge, through the neighborhoods and past all the people. It took me almost five hours to get back to my place, and I could’ve done it in three and a half if I hadn’t taken my time with it. I don’t think I could’ve picked a nicer day for it – the day had been breezy for July, so most of the humidity was gone and the sky was completely and totally clear, just a sharp blue as far as I could see above all the buildings. Once I got off Manhattan and past the tourists on the Bridge, and got a little farther beyond the major roads, I turned onto the side streets and had them pretty much to myself. Sometimes someone would come alone, and I’d just tug my hat down or my scarf up and they’d walk by me without looking at me past the whole ‘person dressed for winter in the middle of summer’ thing. None of them knew what was under it all, and that still gave me a little thrill, that I still had something; maybe a few more people knew what I looked like under everything, but they still didn’t.

When I got to the park, I stopped at the edge, then took off my sunglasses – I had enough covered nobody would be able to notice anything, and I wanted to see how everything looked without them in the way. I put them back on when I got out, and took them off again a little while later to get a good look at the sun in the trees. LA has more trees than people think it does, and not all goddamn palm trees, either. It’s got a lot of native California trees in most of the suburbs that got planted when the houses went up, and since pretty much everything can grow in Southern California the whole city’s lousy with fruit trees. I knew a guy who had a banana tree in his backyard that had the best fucking bananas in the world, fresher than anything I could ever buy at any supermarket since I could just go into his backyard and pick and eat them right away. There was this one oak grove in one of the parks I always loved, and there’s some oaks out in Brooklyn. They’re not the same sort of oak, and there’s almost no fruit trees, and most of the trees are bigger and taller and lose their leaves in fall, and it all took some getting used to. And the way the light catches on them when it comes down through the leaves, and it makes them this bright green I don’t see anywhere else, was what made me think it’d be worth it to get used to them.

I stopped just long enough to get some take-out for dinner, and carried it up all seven flights of stairs to the roof so I could eat and watch the sunset. I had a pretty decent view west from my bedroom window, but I was in the mood for a bigger horizon.

18.

Two weeks later I was in Double Cross, trying to yawn to get my ears to pop. The train ride in had been one I’d pulled alone this time around, and maybe it would’ve been better if I’d shared it with someone since I’d have had someone to talk to; it took me almost half a day to get in and I wasn’t tired enough to sleep through any of it.

Engineer was there already, his truck was parked just inside our half of the base, and I could hear Demo and Scout arguing through the door before I opened it. Scout was happier to see me, and started bugging me to take my mask off right away, but he knew I had shit I needed to deal with first. After I checked into respawn I didn’t bother putting my glove back on, and after I picked out my room, I went down to my pants and shirt and went right back out to the kitchen. I wasn’t in denial about shit, and I knew the only way to get them to stop glancing at me out of the corners of their eyes was to get them used to looking at me. Even if I did eat lunch alone in my room, but I’d gotten in around three so nobody really gave a crap about it.

Spy still managed to keep doing it even after everyone else had gotten over the shock of me sitting out there basically naked. I didn’t know what his problem was, except he just kept looking at me without even bothering to pretend he was reading his book, so I just gave up on the movie, turned off the TV, and asked him, “So what is it?”

He looked like he hadn’t expected me to say anything. “It’s nothing.”

“No, it’s something, or else you wouldn’t keep looking at me that way.”

“And which way is that?”

“Just tell me what the fuck your problem is.”

He sighed and put his book down. “Tell me, do you use garden shears on your hair?”

That wasn’t anything close to what I’d been expecting him to ask about. “What?”

“It is, frankly, abominable, and I cannot imagine how you stand it under that mask of yours.”

“It’s fine. I cut it myself.”

“Oh – no, no, I won’t have that. Come.” He stood up and motioned for me to follow him. “Trust me, this is not for your sake. I know how it is to keep something on my head throughout the day, and I will not be able to look at you now without remembering how much fuss it is with a mess. This is a purely selfish offer.”

I nodded. “I can live with that.”

He grabbed an extra sheet from the hall closet and sat me down in his room with the door wide open and the sheet around my neck, and pulled an electric razor out from one of his bags. “I use this myself,” he said when he plugged it in. “Good lord, when was the last time anyone cut your hair?”

“Jesus, that would’ve been, uh.” The last time someone cut it for me was the last time I’d been in a hospital. “Maybe four, four and a half years.”

He muttered something in French and turned it on, filling up the room with a low buzz. He kept muttering as he started on the right side of my head, moving from the back to the front.

“How short is your hair?” I asked.

“Shorter than what I’ll leave for you. There’s quite a bit to – no,” he slapped my hand away. “When I’m done, if you please.”

I rolled my eyes and put my hand back in my lap. “How long is this gonna take?”

“Not too long, if you’re –”

“Finally getting that damn haircut, are we?” We both stopped to look at Soldier standing in the hallway, taking in the sight with a huge grin. “Always knew you had it in you. Carry on!” He saluted before marching off to finish whatever the hell he’d been planning on doing. Spy just sighed and went back to cutting my hair. When he was done, he’d left maybe a quarter-inch of neat black stubble that ruffled and tickled a bit when I ran my hands over it. I kept running them back and forth over my head to keep it going.

“If I may, what precisely happened to your hands?”

“You mean besides burning them?”

“Yes. Your fingers, that is.”

I shrugged. “It’s just scars.” Scars and some contracture, and it’d be nice to open my hands all the way, but it wasn’t by that much, and I could still point and grip and punch and feel just fine. “And thanks for doing this.”

“As I said, it was selfish of me. But you are welcome.”

It made showering a hell of a lot easier, at least. I’d never bothered shaving anything so I’d never owned a razor, but I’d have to pick one up the next time I was in the city.

When I got out of the shower block, Demo was weaving down the hallway, drinking a mug of something or other, and stopped when he saw me. “Oh, well, g’evenin’ t’you.”

“Hey.” I nodded, and looked around. Neither of us moved. He leaned against the wall and I scratched the back of my neck with my free hand. “So what’s got you up late?”

“Not much, no, jus’ gettin’ some tea.” He took a sip. “I’ll be needin’ a couple more hours, makin’ grenades f’r tomorrow, an’ this should see me through it.”

“Right.”

“An’ you?”

I jerked my thumb behind me. “Shower before bed.”

“Right, then.”

I moved the towel to my other hand and he took another drink.

“You got any new weapons you’ll be trying out?”

“Nae, not this time ’round.” He took another drink. “An’ ye?”

“Same.” I moved to lean against the wall. “I might do some tinkering – I was thinking of maybe playing around with my flare gun to see what I can do to soup it up.”

“Get some good range on a detonation?”

We’d played around with sticky-bomb jumps a few times back at Coldfront and had a great time with it, but we’d both been frustrated I couldn’t get all that high. “Yeah, something like that.”

“Good idea, that, if ye can get it t’happen. Nothin’ like the air under yer feet.”

“Yeah.”

He took another sip. “Say, if ye don’t mind my askin’. How’s it ye know yer way ’round machines so well as t’make all yer weapons?”

I’d braced myself for something a fuckton worse than that, and needed a moment to get my thoughts back together. I could ask him why the fuck he cared, or I could just answer the fucking question. “I worked in a garage for a few years.”

“Pardon?”

“See, I met this guy in a burn ward when we were both in there, and he owned a garage, this really fucking nice repair shop, and before he got discharged he told me if I needed a job I could look him up and see if he had anything open. So when I did, I checked him out, and it turned out he had something open when I got there, so I spent about seven, eight years working for him.”

Demo nodded. “Good, honest work wi’yer hands, can’t complain.”

“Paid pretty well, too.” I shrugged. “Not anywhere near as good as what RED does, but, you know.”

“Oh, ’course I do.” He smiled. “Ah, me broker’s gonna be so pleased.”

“Broker?”

“Investments, lad!” He laughed, then stopped. “Lass? Sorry, it’s takin’ some gettin’ used to –”

“Lad’s fine,” I said. “I really don’t give a shit.”

“All right, then.” He nodded. “See ye tomorrow mornin’, then.”

“Night.”

I watched him weave his way down the hall, then went to get some sleep.

The next morning, Scout was pounding on the door by the time I was up and getting dressed. “Hey, c’mon, open up in there, we ain’t got all day for breakfast!”

I yanked the door open and went back to the chair to pull on my boots. “I’m coming, just let me get these on.”

“Well, if that’s all you gotta do, I guess it ain’t…uh…”

When I looked up at his face, he didn’t shift his eyes around, and I followed his gaze and realized – oh, Jesus. I wear these ugly as fuck sports bras that I’ve washed maybe a thousand times each and I had a t-shirt on and I didn’t have that much chest to begin with, but he was still – “Jesus, Scout, they’re just tits.”

“Yeah, but – but – they’re yours, and, and they were here, and I mean we had tits on the base for years and I never –”

“Stop.” I stood up and held my hand palm-out in front of me. “Just stop right there and shut the fuck up.”

“But they’re –”

“Yeah, they’re mine, and what’s it to you?” He opened his mouth and left it that way for a moment before closing it again, and kept it closed all the way to the kitchen. Everyone else was there already, talking and eating, and we got a couple of waves and nods and grunts but they all kept their attention on the food. When I took a deep breath of all the smells and saw Engie at the stove, I knew why – he’s a hell of a cook, and he’d made bacon and was cooking up some little biscuits in the leftover grease, and I had no idea what they’re called but they’re pretty much the best thing to start the day with.

I grabbed a couple of the ones he’d finished, a few strips of bacon, a fork and knife from the drawer and poured myself a cup of coffee, and was about to leave for my room when Scout asked, “Hey, ain’t you gonna eat with us?”

He’d asked quietly, standing right next to me, before he’d gotten any breakfast for himself. Nobody else had heard him, thank fuck, not even Engie. I didn’t want everyone stopping everything they were doing and turning to look at me and judge me on the answer I gave. Scout was more than enough. I hadn’t though I would – I thought I’d just eat in my room the way I always did, the way I always had. I honestly hadn’t expected anyone to ask me about it or give a shit whether I did or not, and I knew whatever I did he’d just roll with it, even if I answered him with a huge ‘no’ and kept eating alone. He probably thought he’d get a no anyway, even if he’d asked nicely. But he’d still asked.

“Sure, why the fuck not.” It was worth it just for the look on his face. I turned around and sat at the edge of the table, nudging Heavy with my elbow. “Hey, scoot over.”

Maybe he was too confused at me sitting down and eating in front of everyone else to make any sort of comment in any language about not scooting over for anything smaller than a grizzly bear, since he did it without making a fuss. Down the bench, Medic grumbled and Demo swore, and then they and everyone else shut up when they saw me take a bite of the bacon. Even Engie turned around to see me take a sip of coffee. Pretty damn good coffee. “Hey, Spy, you make this?”

“Ah, yes.”

“It’s good.”

“Merci, luciole.”

“I don’t know what the hell that means, but it’s still good coffee.”

“Buck-sixty,” Engineer called from the stove.

“What?” Soldier asked.

“Just ignore it,” I said around a mouthful of bacon.

By the time I started on the biscuits, everyone had gotten used to the idea of me eating with them and wasn’t up to staring openly anymore. I was too fucking happy with the biscuits to give a shit about the corner-of-the-eye glances I was getting, and at this rate, they’d be gone this time tomorrow.

“Say, Pyro,” Sniper put down his mug. “I been wonderin’ for a while, how’s it you –”

“I have a funnel and a bag I empty in the shower.” I didn’t look up from my plate and took another sip of coffee.

“I was wonderin’ that too, but I was tryin’ to ask how you deal with your monthlies.”

That got me to look up at him. “’scuse me?”

“That’s what y’say over here, right?”

“Sometimes, I guess. I just call it my period.” I shrugged. “I use a cup.” He nodded, and everyone else just looked confused. “A cup?” They definitely didn’t know what I was talking about, but this was something they just didn’t know about, and I could deal with that. “It’s made of rubber, about this big, with a little handle.” I held my fingers apart to show them. “I fold it up and stick it in my –”

“That’s plenty,” Engie shouted.

“And I just empty it out at the end of the day,” I cut to the end to finish up. Sniper looked like he was about to say something else. “Don’t even think about asking,” I warned him, and he closed his mouth and went back to his own coffee.

A couple of minutes later Heavy cleared his throat and looked down at me. “I had –” He stopped, and started again. “We know you are woman, now, in all that suit, but still, the other BLU Pyro, we do not. And I had to think, if our Pyro is woman…”

“You’re asking me if the BLU Pyro’s a girl too?”

“Da.”

I laughed. “And how the fuck am I supposed to know?”

“Buck sixty-five,” Engie called.

“What’s that about?” Scout asked.

I sighed. “Just ignore it.”

It wasn’t over just because my team knew or because they learned to stop giving a fuck. No fucking way was I letting BLU find out what I kept under my suit and mask because that was just begging for trouble. It wouldn’t ever be over, not really, not until the war was done. I just didn’t have to worry about my team anymore, and that was a better victory than anything I’d get out in the field. No matter what I had on, they knew my face, the face I wanted them to see.

Next to me, Heavy and Soldier started talking about their shotguns – then Scout and Engineer joined in, and then Spy mentioned pistols. Soon everyone was talking; I smiled, took another drink of coffee, and joined the conversation.

 

19\. Epilogue

The eight of them had gathered around the benches in the locker room, the only space indoors large enough to let everyone move freely. Medic was seated and leaning forward, his glasses in one hand and his elbows on his knees; Heavy stood behind him, rubbing his back to keep him upright. Sniper and Spy stood together by the unused bank of lockers, some space between them. Soldier was seated ramrod straight, Engineer and Demoman next to him. Scout was pacing back and forth and around everyone else.

None of them were being quiet.

Demo was shouting at Spy for not paying enough attention, Soldier was trying to lecture Scout on proper military decorum. Heavy was telling Engineer to leave Medic out of this as Medic said he was fine on his own while Sniper demanded Engineer not single out Medic.

Every one of them was trying to be heard over the others, and it quickly grew to full-out shouting matches that switched participants as fast as new arguments could be made. No one noticed when Soldier stopped speaking, too busy with accusations. Medic was hissing at Scout and Demo and still holding his stomach to keep himself from throwing up, and the two of them were yelling right back. Heavy and Spy were arguing loudly in French, while Sniper and Engineer were right in each other’s faces, their accents growing thicker with each word. None of them were talking about the original reason for their gathering. Soldier looked around at his teammates and stood up to stand on the bench. No one noticed. He adjusted his helmet and took a deep breath.

“WE SHOULD ALL BE ASHAMED OF OURSELVES.”

No one heard him. He took another breath and yelled again, louder.

“I SAID, WE SHOULD ALL BE ASHAMED OF OURSELVES, YOU WEAK-LIVERED PEACE-LOVING FAILURES OF MAGGOTRY SONS OF BITCHES!”

Everyone turned to look at him.

“NONE OF US HAVE A SINGLE SHRED OF A DECENCT ARGUMENT UPON WHICH TO –”

“Hold on, what the hell are you talkin’ ’bout?” Scout asked.

“IT IS NOT IN OUR REALM TO JUDGE, BOY, AND –”

“And it is in yours?” Heavy didn’t let go of Spy’s necktie. “You, of all of us, say we do not judge. This must be joke.”

“Far from it, twinkle-toes, I am the LAST one to judge anyone who sets forth on their chosen life’s path! As a matter of fact, NONE of us are capable of dispensing accusations of culpability like the ones you are so happy to throw around!”

Scout stopped pacing, Spy tugged his tie back and tucked it into his jacket, and Medic put his glasses back on. Demo grinned up at Soldier. “Oh, do tell.”

“Gladly, Mansour! Pyro decided on the path she wanted for her life, and when she did, she took it, and not only that, she wrung its neck until it begged for mercy! Every one of us has done the same! And as long as one has the courage to see such business through I WILL NOT STAND BY AND LET ANYONE –”

“Indeed,” Spy said.

“What?” Soldier asked, along with Sniper and Engineer.

“I am afraid I find myself in agreement with you, however distasteful the proposition, as you make a fair point in our assessment of our absent teammate.” He smiled at Medic, then took his time meeting everyone’s gaze. “We have all made our choices that brought us here, and we all live with them, and each other, so who are we to say she cannot do so as well?”

“That ain’t the point!” Scout yelled. “The whole point’s that she ain’t –”

“She ain’t what, been honest? Well, have you? Any of us? Which one of us has been utterly and completely honest without a single reservation? Please, let us at least be honest about being dishonest, so many in this world are not.” He lit a cigarette. “But I think we, all of us, are not asking the proper question.”

“An’ what exactly is that?” Demo asked.

“Ah-ha, yes.” Spy blew out a gentle stream of smoke. “We sit here wondering if we can trust Pyro, now that we know what was hidden so long under that mask. We shout accusations that we cannot, and we forget we already have. Which one of us has not won a victory over an opponent thanks to her interventions? Which of us has not already put our life in her hands and understood she would keep it safe? And we wonder, can we trust her?

“No, gentlemen, the question we have to ask now, is simply, can she trust us?”

To that, none of them could say a word.


End file.
